It is more than just another, small, fine production that Maxi Pongratz from Oberammergau and Micha Acher, well-traveled global citizen from Weilheim, brought about. The album “Musik für Flugräder” is a poetic total work of art of the highest order, a philosophical essay on the role of art and the artist, played mischievously and designed with the necessary portion of understatement.
The accordion player Pongratz, who escaped the narrow genre of folk music, and the multi-instrumentalist Acher have known each other for years: Acher has the albums of Kofelgschroa produced, the musician around Pongratz, who first learned Bavarian-Alpine folk music, but then muddled out of the eternal twosome and country folk. Nevertheless, it was heard from them that they still loved all of this. But: how to capture such a wild, weird liberation event, fit into the rigid stereo sound image?
With bassoon and bass clarinet
Micha Acher, the one with his brother The Notwist in any case, they managed to record the guys from the edge of the Alps, to stage the recordings adequately. He also engaged Pongratz as a solo artist for a music series of the Münchner Kammerspiele and assembled a chamber orchestra around him. The sound body, which consists of unusual instruments such as bassoon and bass clarinet, accordion and melodica, a Banda experimentalale, forms the starting point of the new album production.
With great delicacy, sounds and tones, textures, as we know them from notated, classical music, are removed from the usual contexts and translated into something new that is structurally reminiscent of pop music or what jazz pioneer Carla Bley plays when she morphs into film music by Nino Rota. Pongratz and Acher, who studied music and can write scores, have dedicated their pieces to the ideas, films, objects and drawings of the outsider artist and aircraft inventor Gustav Mesmer.
“How happy one can be who drives down the mountain and doesn’t take off!”
“And that touched me so incredibly,” says Acher, “how happy a guy can seem when he is there with his bike, which is built with plastic bags and constructions that can never take off – how happy someone can be Goes downhill and doesn’t take off and still has such a totally brilliant charisma, such a satisfied one. And I always thought that was amazing. “
Gustav Mesmer (1903-1994) from Swabia was obviously a clever, imaginative person who had to spend most of his time in a mental hospital. Today would be classified as queer, not in the sexual sense, of course, but queer in the sense that Thomas Bernhard, Jean Dubuffet and Bob Dylan were or still are.
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