ubtly shifting colors over extended sequences, caked in a glacial freeze that thaws with hard cracks and pops within the ice floes, turntablist Janek Schaefer’s latest album Black Immure is a work that requires intense concentration to appreciate its many intricate pleasures. The album is a live recording of a piece composed specifically for the old mansion in which it was performed, and the Portuguese casa’s reverb-laden atmosphere surrounds this music like a dampening fog, enclosing on all sides. The music inspires claustrophobia, inviting images of darkened corridors and nighttime gardens draped with moonlit mist. There is a skewed Romanticism to Schaefer’s drones and hiss, a nostalgia that seems embedded into the persona of the vinyl deconstructionist despite the modern methods of Schaefer and his many kindred souls.


This Romantic spirit is the beating heart and driving force behind Black Immure, an hour-long continuous work divided almost arbitrarily into 12 movements for the CD release. Schaefer’s primary tool is, as ever, his custom-designed turntable, here playing records he found in a Portuguese shop before the concert. But this prerecorded musical element rarely ever enters too prominently into the proceedings. Even more so than his closest counterpart, Philip Jeck, Schaefer is unconcerned with the actual music encoded onto the vinyl he collects. These records are sound sources for him, raw materials to be tweaked and manipulated until they conform to the essential function of the piece at hand. For Black Immure, Schaefer has crafted a subtle, dense sea of sound, with staticky waves churning over distant classical strings or charmingly upbeat melodies.


The turntablist also incorporates field recordings he made of the old casa’s piano, which add an eerie sense of place and time to the proceedings. The sixth track, which features Schaefer’s plaintive, minimalist piano reverberating beneath a pristine surface of drones and distant rhythmic clattering, is one of the best here, achieving a delicacy and emotional resonance not heard quite as effectively on the rest of the album. Which is not to say that the rest isn’t excellent, too. The first five tracks build logically towards this halfway mark, ebbing and flowing from calm stasis to chaotic outbursts and back again with a deceptive ease. After the sixth track’s moment of transcendence, the music slowly winds back into itself, swallowing choirs and pianos whole into the near-silence of a primeval heartbeat or the slow lapping of a wave upon the shoreline. Schaefer’s quietude never works against him; despite being a live performance, this all seems very planned, very natural in its subtle transitions and shifts in mood. The tonal transformations are always striking and surprising, and always timed perfectly so that the piece’s overall moody consistency doesn’t become overbearing.


As the music gently wends its way onward, it alternately evokes the dread of night, the playfulness of children and the feeling of walking down an ancient street in old historic Europe. Schaefer’s meditative vinyl patchwork is as full of variety and life as these snapshot impressions would seem to indicate, stretching far beyond the specific locale where it was recorded. That’s why the evolving tapestry of sound emanating from Schaefer’s turntables evokes this kind of connection even without its original context of the darkened space where it was recorded. The disc closes with the sound of applause -- apparently, recorded while Schaefer had already fled the building, allowing the music to fade away of its own accord. It’s an appropriate symbolic close to the preceding hour, music and creator both departing together like ghosts into the night.