Catching up with Impakt Records: Part I

By Nick Ostrum

Impakt Records is a label dedicated to documenting Cologne’s free improvisation scene, much of which revolves around the club Loft Köln. The imprint has been in operation since 2016, and, since those early days, has accumulated nearly 40 releases. In a two-part series, I will review the five released in 2024 and so far in 2025.

Simon Rummel On Water Orchestra – Der Zauberlehrling (Impakt, 2025) 

Der Zauberlehrling (English: the sorcerer’s apprentice) is German composer Simon Rummel’s first release as leader on Impakt. The On Water Orchestra he has gathered is a 34-musician strong ensemble of musicians who deploy instruments ranging from the conventional (clarinet, trumpet, various strings) to, in the orchestral world, the unconventional (accordion, recorders, glass harmonica.)

The first composition, the titular 'Der Zauberlehrling', starts slowly but soon gives way to a jumble of long high-pitched tones that wafts and waxes, in the process revealing various textures and timbral variants. At certain peaking moments, it sounds as if one of the glass harmonicas (I think) is going to break into the upper reaches of Morten Laurdisen’s 'O Magnum Mysterium' but the drone quickly pulls any valancing strands back. A close listen reveals subtle pitch changes, but nothing that distracts from the forward-moving hum. Then, after several minutes, the various elements begin to distinguish themselves, not necessarily into easily identifiable instruments but discrete units, which take over the charge propelling the drone forward. This very much sounds like an exercise in building and harnessing energy, with stray musical electrons shedding here and there but the continued gradual surge forming the unifying element. Shimmering, engrossing, and hauntingly gorgeous.

Much of the same could be said for the next piece, 'Musik für den Lehrling des Zauberlehrlings' (music for the apprentice of the sorcerer’s apprentice), though the drone here quickly gives way to flights of clustered melodies, pulses of sound, and an interesting reinterpretation of more traditional compositional structures. Whereas the first piece enchants with its patience, this one moves, periodically opening into truly radiant passages and often bobbing just beneath that. Maybe this composition is the more sprightly study for the less experienced apprentice’s apprentice before they get to the disciplined practice that the sorcerer’s apprentice (rather than the sorcerer’s apprentice’s apprentice) must go through. One is left to wonder whether the sorcerer’s own piece would be even more focused and sparing than the first composition, or if by then the lesson is learned, and he would be free to explore new structures of rival splendor. 

Stefan Schönegg - Enso: On the withered tree a flower blooms (Impakt, 2024)

Impakt’s final release of 2024 was Stefan Schönegg’s Enso: On the withered tree a flower blooms. (The title itself is a fitting if optimistic tribute to what in terms of politics and warfare, at least, was an abysmal year for many.) On it, pianist Marlies Debacker (see 'Convolution' below) and drummer Etienne Nillesen, here solely on snare, join bassist Schönegg in a 44’ realization of his composition referenced in the title. Schönegg and Nillesen have released several albums of the former’s compositions in his Enso project. Debacker joined them, it seems, for the first time on the previous release, 2023’s Enso: A Simplified Space.

The base of Enso: On the withered tree a flower blooms is a heavy ribbon of oscillating drones provided firstly by Schönegg’s arco, but also a background of mellitic churning that seems to come from either internal piano or drum and cymbal bowing, and more likely both. The various drones fade in and out, though Schönegg’s bass is the insistent trunk to a tree otherwise limp. To extend the metaphor, it is this continued repository of life on which the flowers – the twangs of resonance, whatever is going on with the percussion and piano – bloom. The analogy is imperfect. Twenty-eight minutes in Schönegg hands the leadership to what sounds like a soft organ, which picks up the tone as the bass ceases. Slowly other glimmering sounds enter, as well. But, then comes the bass again, playing lower than before and adding a different vibrational wavelength that seems to quietly ring Nillesen’s cymbals. That is, unless Nillesen himself is performing this delicate task.

I swear I hear electronics in this piece, but I have been assured all this acoustic. In that, all the more power to Schönegg, Deback, and Nillesen. This piece shows incredible control in its strange and patient sonic layers and fusions, and in that it also shows an attractive vision of music that pushes the listener to confront the mutually constitutive dialectic between stasis and movement, convention and perception, and deterioration and blossoming.