Ingrid Schmoliner - MNEEM

In dimmed light the pianist and composer Ingrid Schmoliner takes the stage in the Großer Saal of the Wiener Konzerthaus. She sits down at the grand piano prepared with carved wooden sticks, nails, rubber and porcupine bristles, pauses for a moment in silence and then finally begins to repeat a rapid quaver figure in the right hand, which changes only minimally over the course of the piece.
At first it sounds like muffled church bells, a little later like a xylophone and at the end like gamelan gongs. The left hand counters the oscillating magic with percussive accents, which are mixed/amplified and sent into the hall through loudspeakers. After incredible 61 minutes the right hand finally comes to rest. That is how long the deeply impressive premiere of Schmoliner's composition „MNEEM“ was performed. The work is one of the highlights of the thirty-second edition of Wien Modern (…)

— Florian Amort, FAZ 12.12.2019

The composer and pianist Ingrid Schmoliner writes and plays music the allure of which cannot be resisted. Her pieces are ecstatic cascades of sound which unite formal strictness and psychoactive effects. Schmoliner plays them with absolute precision. Her perfect technique allows her to create dramatic arcs with subtle variations. This creates hunting rides through tunnels of sound, whose sonic characteristics due to a carefully prepared piano remind one of Gamelan music. Sometimes percussive and noisy, and in the next moment clear and open with shimmering overtones.

Schmoliner’s music is compelling and at the same time aethereal and fleeting. It sounds like soulful mechanics, sprawling organically into boundlessness. Its essence is the process.

Her new work MNEEM is a musical monolith. It is a breathtaking one hour plus tour de force through complex uptempo pattern, played on the prepared grand piano. A unique musical experience that unfolds its magic instantly after a few minutes. For the player MNEEM is a very exhausting piece; it demands full concentration and technical skills of the highest level. For the audience it is a euphoric trancelike journey of 62 minutes that will leave the listeners thunderstruck.

Ingrid Schmoliner composed MNEEM as a commissioned work for the Wien Modern Festival in 2019. It was premiered at the Wiener Konzerthaus in the same year and recorded there by Alexander Yannilos (sounddesign). It was mixed and mastered by Martin Siewert.

MNEEM will be available as a high quality vinyl sized print with download code as well as a digital release. The stones for the album - photographed by Maria Frodl - were collected by the artist from rivers and beaches on her travels. Those are stones that accompany Ingrid Schmoliner with beauty/haptics/depth and consciousness. On the prints it is written from which river or beach these stones were found.

The information for MNEEM and the poem will be printed on an extra hard panel which comes in addition to secure the print. Graphic works by Hannah Mayr.

Poem by Andrew Choate

mud

is stone too

now with footsteps and water
evaporate me back into the clouds
a foreign consciousness

afar remains, distant and graspable

Biography

Ingrid Schmoliner was born on the mountains in Carinthia - now she lives as a musician/composer/curator/ pedagogue in Vienna.
ArMsMcally she works in the genres of new music, experimental and improvised music, avant-garde, jazz, ambient music, free jazz, folk music, minimal music and techno.
Through her precise sound research and nuanced work on the piano and voice, she has made a name for herself as a musician and composer on internaMonally renowned stages.
Fixe ensembles are with: Elena Kakaliagou (Zinc & Copper) the duo Nabelóse,
Griff (Emilio Gordoa, Adam Pultz Melbye); drank with Alexander KranabeVer, Towering Silence with Adam Pultz Melbye, ELLEGGUA with Elektro Guzzi and a duo with Hamid Drake.
Schmoliner is co-founder of the annual New Adits fesMval for contemporary music and interdisciplinary performance and has been awarded several prizes and grants.

Ingrid Schmoliner performed MNEEM in the Wiener Konzerthaus 2019 - Festival Wien Modern: