Tomáš Niesner - Bečvou

A Closer Listen

Remember if you will a beautiful river that was part of your childhood.  Perhaps you played alongside the riverbanks, sent paper boats downstream, hopped across the rocks, splashed water to cool or tease.  You may have fished in this river.  You may have brought dates, enjoyed picnics, or simply strolled the shore.

Now imagine that some chemical company leaked hazardous materials in the water and killed 40 tons of wildlife.  Imagine the shock, the horror, the smell, the sense of betrayal.  This is what happened to the Czech Republic’s Bečva River, beloved by the young Tomáš Niesner and still, amazingly, loved now.  The artist decided to walk the length of the river, 100 km to Morava, recording all the way.  Upon his return, he folded the field recordings into a gorgeous longform piece (separated into ten tracks on the album, blurring into the next like water around a bend), where zither, guitar and modular synthesizer play like shiny fish in the stream.  The album is an expression of love and loss, sorrow and hope, a time capsule of the Polluted Time, a prayer for renewal, the artist’s stream-colored shirt a symbol of interrelated fate.

The river is heard immediately, the main character of the project quietly established in the mix.  Niesner’s finger-style guitar is pensive, taking inventory of the situation step by step, attempting to reflect the stream itself rather than the anger over its violation.  And then the sound of birds, sweet birds, still alive, still singing, an early sign that the Bečva may not be done.  The field recordings are heard most clearly between tracks, but remain a constant presence like the thought of nature even when one has left nature.

Step by step Niesner walks, alone with his thoughts, a travel journalist whose language is music. Without breaks, the journey would take at least 40 hours.  With stops and sleep, we suspect it took a week: enough time for perspective to set in, for memories to surface, for the artist to notice little things: the scars in the grass or the persistence of the water, continuing to flow despite obstacles, despite irradiation.  As drones begin to wash over the recording, one thinks of a cloud of despair, an inescapable muck, the drowning of childhood joy.  And on the river flows, and on.

Halfway through, organ tones rise to the foreground, a reminder of churches, of hymns lost and found.  One cannot help but think that Niesner is composing an elegy, as the tone turns funereal.  Salvation arises in a bubbly synth motif, happily joined by a jaunty guitar tune, a respite before the choral ghosts.  The old river is gone.  A new river arises in its place.

In the final minutes of the piece, the artist seems restored as well.  His guitar grows calmer as he nears Morava.  The music exudes a sense of gratitude for the past and present; even in its current state, the river can, and does, offer peace.  This reconciliation is a minor miracle: not where many of us might be given the same circumstances.  The composition ~ as well as Niesner’s own journey ~ is a wonder. (Richard Allen)

The Quietus

Whenever Werner Herzog felt like fighting with powers much higher than a human, he set out on a long walk. In November 1974, he received a letter from a friend informing him that his mentor, German-French film critic Lotte H. Eisner is seriously ill and on her deathbed. Immediately, the already celebrated German director packed a small backpack and a compass and set out on a journey from München to Paris, documented in his 1978 travelogue Of Walking in Ice. Herzog sought solace and believed a few hundred kilometres walk would save his friend. 

Herzog’s book inspired Czech guitarist Tomáš Niesner, who carried out a similar journey to heal the toxically poisoned river Bečva. Field recordings of hissing water, timid herons, and other birdsongs he gathered on the way became a core structure for his record Bečvou. Niesner combines acoustic guitar or zither with a buzzing modular synthesiser. One song pours into the other, and the album meanders with the river he followed: between droney dark ambient and Americana fingerpicking, ominous and soothing tones. 

In 2020, the Moravian river Bečva in the Eastern part of Czechia was contaminated and polluted with cyanide, allegedly from one of the industrial complexes nearby. The enormous disaster damaged the natural population of over forty kilometres of Bečva’s waterway, and it may take ten to fifteen years to return it. Niesner walked over one hundred kilometres in five days, passing by deadened parts of the river and industrial zones, which appear on the album as corrupted ambient pieces like ‘Fragment’, a track that sounds close to the frozen soundscapes of Celestiteby Wolves in the Throne Room. Elsewhere, Niesner sets a deeply sentimental guitar as in ‘K Břehům’. 

Niesner, as someone with a background in noise-rock bands like Unna or Vlněna, can distil heavy emotions. Playing at high volume took its toll and damaged his ears, so, a few years ago, he turned to acoustic guitar. First as a duo Šimanský Niesner, with Unna’s drummer Jakub Šimanský, they released their 2019’s debut Tance neznámé. Niesner then devoted himself to experiments with open-tunings and improvisation on his solo debut Aurora in 2020. 

While Nienser’s previous record was marked by sublime drones as if created only by hitting the fretboard or by vibrating strings; on Bečvou the drones sounds more intentionally composed. Vaguely echoing the composers associated with Stockholm’s Elektronmusikstudion, like Maria W Horn, and matching the tender aesthetics of Warm Winter Ltd. – especially the drone-oriented stuff like Simulacra by German-Icelandic trio Minua, among whom Niesner finds a home for his second solo album. 

He crafts music, which is exploratory and eternally moving like in ‘Chladná voda’ opened by sounds of trickling water, layered with gently ecstatic organ chord which evolves into immersive guitar melody, and they conflate into one. Or ‘Soutok’, with reverberated melodies and metallic soundscapes, even reminds me of Tim Hecker’s power ambient material. On the album, Niesner naturally blends both of his faces for the first time, fingerpicking guitar minimalism with an interest in electronic music, to results which feel innovative. Whether you listen to Bečvou as a sonic travelogue or as a document of environmental grief, Niesner will guide you through paths that yield emotional payoffs.

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