The New York label Mode Records releases “Naturstudium”, the second solo album by Spanish percussionist and composer Luis Tabuenca.

The Spanish percussionist and composer Luis Tabuenca (Zaragoza, 1979) has just released on the New York label Mode Records his album Naturstudium – his second solo album, after Volavérunt, released in 2014, in addition to the five he has recorded in collaboration with musicians such as Jeff Kaiser, John Edwards, Guillermo Lauzurica, Ignacio Monterrubio, Wade Matthews and Dafna Naphtali. It consists of six pieces for percussion created in 2018 during an artistic residency at the Fabra i Coats Creation Factory in Barcelona and premiered on 5 October 2019 at the Seismes Festival in Barcelona.

Naturstudium, as Tabuenca explains on his website, is a cycle of works that takes nature as a source of inspiration, and focuses on the exploration of apparently inaudible sounds. The title refers to the essay published by the painter Paul Klee in 1923 in the weekly events magazine of the Bauhaus school. In his text entitled Wege des Naturstudium [Ways of Studying Nature] Klee proposed to artists different ways of looking at natural objects, so that they would connect their body with the observed object. Each of the pieces on the disc – Angelus Novus, Twittering Machine [Die Zwitscher-Maschine], Ad Parnassum, The Growth of the Night Plants [Pflanzenwachstum], Insula Dulcamara, Fish Magic – refers to the title of a painting by Paul Klee [those in brackets are the original German titles], as is explained in detail in the programme notes written by the American percussionist and conductor Steven Schick, who was Tabuenca’s professor at the University of California, San Diego.

Tabuenca’s Naturstudium project is, in reality, much broader and consists, so far, of a second part, composed in 2021, for soprano saxophone, and will be continued in 2024 with a third part, thanks to the support of the BBVA Foundation, which has awarded him one of its prestigious Leonardo Grants for researchers and cultural creators, with which he will create Naturstudium 3, for Baschet sound sculptures, to be performed by the prestigious percussion ensemble Les Percussions de Strasbourg and released on record by the Barcelona-based Spanish label Neu Records.

As it says on their website, and although it may seem impossible, there are no electronic treatments in the recording: only amplification at high volume of almost inaudible sounds. The sonorous harmonics of Angelus Novus are cymbals that don’t seem to be percussed with drumsticks, but strummed with something like a violin bow. In Ad Parnassum the percussion on a drum is made with simple drops of water that seem to represent the universal deluge. In Insula Dulcamara what sounds is a bicycle wheel. As can be read in Schick’s liner notes reproduced on Mode Records’ bandcamp, ” this radical change of scale perplexes the ear at first. How could a sound as soft as a simple drop of water be so full and dramatic? So regal? How could it demand so much acoustical and psychic space? But we quickly accommodate the dislocation of perspective and resize ourselves as participants in a Lilliputian sound world. Soon we find ourselves as ant-sized listeners in a teeming rain forest of sounds.”