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Robert Rutman: “Dresden”
From the album Zuuhh!! Muttie Mum!! (1998)
A self-described “sculptor, instrument builder, sound inventor, painter, musician, and graphic artist,” Robert Rutman was born in Berlin in 1931. In 1938, he fled Nazi Germany with his mother, who was Jewish. Rutman arrived in the United States in 1950 after spending the intervening years in England. From 1955 to 1962, he studied art in New York and Mexico City. He started developing the first prototypes of his original musical instruments around 1966, and in 1975 he founded the U.S. Steel Cello Ensemble, based on the technique of using a bow to play large sheets of hanging metal. Rutman’s group toured extensively in the United States and Europe during the 1970s.
In 1990 Rutman moved back to Berlin, where he has lived ever since. Like many of the pioneering musicians of the 60s and 70s, Rutman had to wait several decades for his work to become known and available. In 1989, Pogus Records released an album of his music called 1939, and two other albums came out in the following decade: Music to Sleep by (Tresor, 1997) and the enigmatically titled Zuuhh!! Muttie Mum!! (Die Stadt, 1998). (1939 has since been re-released on CD and is still available from Pogus.) As an token of his newfound cachet, Rutman joined the seminal German experimental band Einstürzende Neubauten for their U.S. tour in 1998.
The sound of Rutman’s steel cello is surprisingly versatile, capable of everything from deep, otherworldly drones reminiscent of an aeolian harp to the jagged, resonant clangor of a postindustrial primal scream. Both extremes are on display in this track, “Dresden,” whose title seemingly invokes the horrors of civilian bombing in World War II.
Played 80 time(s).
November 21, 2010, 4:30pm
