Werner Dafeldecker - Parallel Darks (2020)

What are the bounded limits of sense?

How is it we come to know the world and moreover how is it that we share that experience collectively?

Where are the points of mutual understanding and how can we approach the spectral aspects of our sensing of the world?

It’s these questions that have shaped the approaches used by Werner Dafeldecker on his first fully fledged electro-acoustic outing. Parallel Darks charts out a divergent, yet relational sound field that reflects an intensity of practice that Dafeldecker has cultivated over the better part of three decades.

Concerning himself with sounds that often lie at the periphery of our listening, Parallel Darks layers dense spatial textures into a tightly woven sonic fabric. Calling on materials collected through field recordings, analog synthesis and through his extended instrumental techniques, Dafeldecker seamlessly draws together these sources, creating an at times blurry harmony between elements that might otherwise appear incongruous or in contest.

The sound world Dafeldecker creates is one that is simultaneously musical and profoundly abstract. As potential elements of harmony emerge, they are pulled away through various dynamic interjections, which the draw the focus of the ears. Even in the moments where the sound world settles, micro shifts and submerged densities call the listener deeper again. There is no one singular plateau of sound, rather a constant deepening, a beautiful abyss of spectacular pressure and vital acoustic darkness.

Recorded across 2018 and 2019, each of the editions two pieces dwell on sounds’ capacity to be a spectre. Parallel Darks uses sounds at the very threshold of perception that suggest uneasy acoustic spaces and haunted zones within which the rules of listening in the everyday must be abandoned. In these zones, Dafeldecker carefully crafts hidden sonic relations that call for an intensity of listenership. He rewards us for our auditory efforts with a music of profound detail, subtlety and exquisite beauty.


“It compares music and reality. The music functions like an observer: the music observes reality. And it is precisely the limits of this approach that make us realize something about the observation instrument.
The music, the culturally created, thus becomes a metaphor for perception. A perception that can in no way do justice to what has been perceived, and in this failure can tell us all the more about the limits of our perception and about the process of creating reality in perception.” — Peter Ablinger