There’s always been a core of deep seriousness in Martin Küchen’s music, perhaps never more apparent than here. The cover photo, depicting a snowbound, bleak but oddly beautiful village taken along with the disc’s title (“Hellstorm”) and the allusions to conflict in the titles of the five pieces contained herein point toward an especially dark and fraught experience. A powerful one as well.

The opening track, “Allemagne Année Zero (Hellstorm)” might come as something of a surprise to listeners familiar with Küchen’s recent work but, to these ears, it may be the most powerful music I’ve yet to hear from him. His high-pitched baritone describes a threnody so sorrowful, so moving, the tampoura in the background lending an otherworldliness to the music that’s supremely affecting, though quantifying exactly how that’s manifested would be a fool’s errand. Knowing his work, it’s as though, beneath the scrabbling, gravel and other abstractions in his playing, this has been lurking all along, awaiting the appropriate time to burst forth and it does so stirringly.

The subsequent two tracks are perhaps more along the lines of what we’ve come to expect from Küchen, the first (“The Russia We Lost”) a ruthless reduction of his horn to a tube for conducting streams of breath and spittle, bleak as can be, while the second takes those breaths and adds ghost tones alongside, constructing yet another heartrending portrayal of grief, here that of the citizens of Sarajevo. One can easily hear a cold wind whistling between bombed out buildings. The soft, burbling eddies of “10,000 Jahre” lead to the final work, “Ritual Defamation (to Laird Wilcox)” wherein those same swirls are overlaid with keening, almost frantic squeals, the kind of sounds that, given what one knows of the sources for this recording’s ideas, become painfully difficult to listen to, morphing as they do into the cries of those murdered.

“Hellstorm” is a rare example of experimental music managing to refer directly to historical (and atrocious) events and yet deliver an emotional punch that’s not mitigated in any way, where the programmatic and abstract concerns, more often than not, blend into a powerful and moving whole, resolutely dealing with the real world.

-------- Brian Olewnick