music austria – music information centre austria

2. April 1997

Armed with a few sheets of material - motifs, themes, polychords, formal structures, specifically defined sounds, verbal usabilities etc - I sat down at the piano, hoping I could improvise a whole album, if I just paid enough attention to what I would experience throughout the recording, says Aichinger. The outcome is a melting pot of many different moods; sad, melancholic, somewhat dramatic, cool and still full of life and poetry.

Wiener Zeitung (Christian Rösner)

15. December 2000

Oskar Aichinger's music is an extremely successful attempt to think contradictions. Processes cannot just be categorised comfortably in composition and improvisation.

http://www.openmusic.at

2000

Oskar Aichinger's secret of the arts
"Musicians are often asked what kind of music they are making. This usually suggests a stylistic definition, a narrowing down, maybe even some kind of name dropping, somehow reducing a complex issue to an imaginary skeleton. I feel this is impossible to do, as music is always flesh and bone; mind and soul; individual and collective history," says Oskar Aichinger, composer and pianist, who, over the past ten years, has established himself -- according to Falter -- "without much ado" as a central figure of the "Austrian off-scene". The result, the summary of achievements of musical history in America and Europe over the last century, is captivating, as it is in the case of the trio recording "Elements of Poetry", due to its kaleidoscope-like, stylistic diversity, in which the oscillating soul of Bebop finds its place just as much as the sublime spirit of romantic songs, the subtle drive of Swing and the iridescently changing tone colours of the contemporary avant-garde.

jazz zeit (Wolfgang Lamprecht)

Aichingers pieces compose resonance and silence the way that stained glass windows compose light.

Cadence, New York