Discography

Ümlaut

Half the Speed of Light

“Half the Speed of Light” reimagines and assimilates, in intricate detail, field recordings sampled from across the globe and beyond. It is a meticulously crafted tone poem of otherworldly ambience. In fourteen tracks, Düngfelder probes the covert bond between slowness and the intensity of memory; and between speed and the intensity of forgetting. The album never approaches the listener directly. Instead, it enters through the side door of memory. The continual disassembling and reassembling of myriad sounds, of abstraction and randomization, builds a momentum that never sacrifices its icy groove. The pace is glacial, but deceptively so. There is a lot going on here. Subtle frequency modulation and ghostly ambience artfully interplay with harmonic sensibilities. Simple melodies juxtapose with offbeat alterations in texture. Percussive and rhythmic sequencing, at times, gives way to a total abandonment of rhythm. Sparse, yet bewitching, the sound palette throughout “Half the Speed of Light” plays like a subconscious melody. Bleak, noir-ish and atmospheric. It is a product of passion, artistry and of curiosity. And a very compelling and emotional experience.

VIDEOS:
Quantenphysik
stars rain sun moon
Their Sins Run Deep

Everything In Its Own Place

Ümlaut continues to traverse the realms of experimental and ambient music with “Everything in its own place.” In the interplay of finespun electronics and eclectic field recordings, the listener is airlifted out of the quotidian and into an “immense motionless pause.” A dream-like space where melodies emerge and music breathes. The concept of this album arose during a hearing test. Abstract tones and varying frequencies fed into the headset worn by the composer evoked an epiphany. Like an art-meets-life heartbeat. The abstract tones and frequencies swimming inside the composer’s head would inspire this album. Although the initial test showed hearing damaged, the diagnosis would be reversed. Like science fiction, it was just not true. To quote writer J.G. Ballard, “…sooner or later, everything turns into television.”

The song titles were inspired by the writings of J.G. Ballard.

VIDEOS:
Everything turns into television
Instantly appealing forms

Same But Different

In Japanese, Yūgen signifies “a profound, mysterious sense of the beauty of the universe… and the sad beauty of human suffering.” Yūgen suggests that which is beyond what can be said, but not as an allusion to another world. It is about this world, about this experience. The album cover and musical tracks were inspired by a piece of art that hangs in my bedroom. For weeks, as I lay on my back after surgery, I looked at the painting every day. It became a sort of meditative practice. Up until my recuperation, the meaning of the painting had eluded me. But over time, a closer focus on the artwork brought forth a revelation. The painting was about being reborn. New life, with no attachment to the past and no expectation of the future. A profound liberation of the spirit overtook me. Electronic sparks, intonations, chords, arrhythmic percussions, chimes and whooshes of sound free-floated through my imagination… and “same but different” was born.

VIDEOS:
Clarity and Awareness
Bodhisattvas
Existence

Projection

What is a map? Many things. A promise of a voyage. A sketch or plan. A reflection of one’s inner cartography delineated and projected out into the world. Projection is an ancient alchemical process. When the powder of the philosopher’s stone is cast upon metal, fusion occurs. Metal transmutes into gold. Similarly, through the use of sounds, textures and rhythms, the tracks on the album shine a light on the deeper regions that reside within. From the first track, the itinerary is set. Deconstructed compilations of sound waves, gentle percussion, bells, chinks, clinks and chimes, invite the listener on an exploratory and meditative voyage to a distant land. This is “Projection,” a concept album comprising 24 manageable pieces, or songs or destinations. Map-making at its finest with sound as the transporting medium.

The Sacred Drift

Connecticut resident Jeff Düngfelder, aka Umlaut, bisects the ancient and the modern on his latest long-player, crisscrossing genre and categorical boundaries with ease, to the point that his work is notoriously difficult to pigeonhole, and thank the heavens for that. Variety is indeed the spice of life, and Umlaut drinks deep of such notions, embracing all that’s fascinating about experimental electronic composition and issuing the fruits of his label with obvious relish. Right from the get-go, opening track “The Shaman” is a marvelous bit of pan-cultural Indo-synth fusion, recalling everyone from trippier Harold Budd and Jon Hassell to contemporaries on the Six Degrees label like DJ Cheb I Sabbah, what with its mystical, seance-like feel and breezy, Euro-rhythmic patterning. “Calle” continues such motifs apace, though it's more lost in space than abject star trek, its handstruck percussives, jew’s harps, and earthbound paraphernalia situating it somewhere in an interspatial, fourth-world subconscious. These bold and bodacious sounds get randier and riskier as this splendid recording progresses, from the good vibrations of “Vegetalismo” to the extraordinary synthetic apothecary that is “Saltus”, where tablas ripple across the mind’s eye and the legacies of long-forgotten tribes are reincarnated through synaptic vistas of digital worlds made flesh. Fantastico!

“The Sacred Drift” is a diverse work based on electronics, samples and sound manipulation with many detours into various pop and traditional world music fields.
— African Paper

VIDEO:
The Great Way is not difficult

Musique de Film II

55 soundtracks to 55 one minute films

I approached the creation of 55 films and soundtracks as a condensed spiritual exercise or meditation. A mind cleared of all distraction opens the floodgates to sounds and visuals and flashes of insight. Placing time limitations (at one minute per piece) leaves no room for preconceived notions or second-guessing. The intent was to work fast. Each soundtrack and film was crafted within a 24-hour period. Instrumentals seamlessly merge into an infinite realm of incidental electronics, mechanicals, voice, drones and intonations from the natural world. Corresponding films liquidize and flow with the music, one into the next, enveloping the listener/viewer in a protective world of otherworldly calm. I chose to make a total of 55 pieces because the number 55 is the tenth number (the number of “completeness”) in the Fibonacci sequence (F10). The mathematical pattern of the Fibonacci numbers also presents itself in Art and in Nature, and, now, in MUSIQUE DE FILM II.

“subtle as atoms, hidden as treasure, remote as distant lands”

55 VIDEOS: Watch Now

Grand Trine

A year into lockdown, the pandemic forced me to take a deeper look into myself. Taken out of my comfort zone, I decided to experiment. To think in different ways about composing my music. Themes of luck and chance inform the underlying creative process behind “GRAND TRINE”. In astrology, a grand trine is a harmonious pattern formed when three planets in a horoscope chart are each placed 120 degrees apart in a single moment in time, creating an equilateral triangle. Mindful of the implications of this arrangement, I simplified and clarified my attempts to capture the solemness of the times using meditative images that invited reflection. A contemplative walk through a slowly morphing tapestry gave birth to other musical languages employing sound, form and function. These elements, constellating as dust and interspersing with sparse notes, are disseminated over a landscape of subtle noise. In constant fluctuation, the complex combinations of tones remain warmly alien. Although soberly futuristic, this album is a sombre and subdued effort that, in the end, feels inherently satisfying.

Remote Areas

Inspired by the novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

“Remote Areas” is essential late night listening. Microscopic dissonances and cacophonies dance across beatless borders, fading off into noise, static, and shimmering synthetic structures. Sometimes weightless, always beautiful, a detailed engaging excursion between sound and silence emerges. With a singularly eclectic approach, elements of musique concrete unfold like points on a line. Out of the shadows, it is a return to deep listening, a poem of atmosphere that maintains an omnipresence throughout the record.

November

Sometimes you have to just let something sit for awhile. Put it aside and let it live with itself. With the passing of time, if you are lucky, it will come calling, wanting to see the light of day. Such was the case during the dark days of Covid. November lives.

“One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, “We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I’ll make one. I’ll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I’ll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.” ― Ray Bradbury

The God Particle

The seed for “The God Particle” album was planted back in 2012 when a subatomic particle was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider. The Higgs boson (called the “God particle”) is the particle associated with the Higgs field, an energy field that transmits mass to the things that travel through it. Peter Higgs and Francois Englert theorized way back in 1964 that this is how things in the universe – stars, planets, even people – came to have mass. At the same time I was reading “The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: Commentary on the Raja Yoga Sutras” by Sri Swami Satchidananda. I saw a parallel as it was describing how, with the quintessential concentration of mind (saṁyamḥ), you could dive deeply into an object or idea to release its secrets. Scientists have been using the same concentration method on the atomic particles, gaining knowledge as the particles released their energy, discovering their truth. Patanjali describes how saṁyama (the practice of dhāraṇā, dhyāna and samādhi) is usually done on one object or idea to uncover their secrets. These results or hidden secrets are called siddhis or vibhūti. I focused on the exploration and adaptation of these concepts to uncover them within my world of sound.

Insight

“INSIGHT” can be described as an inward journey of the self through the universe of sound. The album explores personal growth through the vessel of memory and emotion. The 
unexpected and the familiar are turned inward. Environmental sounds, manipulated field recordings, electronic processing and acoustic sourcing contribute to the compositional pastiche. Realities surface and interweave with overlapping electroacoustic textures. 
Hypnotic loops, hushed tones, delicately percussive electronics, whispers and their 
synapses, interplay in a realm of silence. The past captures the future in the matrix of the present moment. The element of chance dances in a dynamic soundscape. With each color, the music comes alive. Technology is humanized. Taking its time, “INSIGHT” unfolds through arpeggiated sequences, melody and ambience, and breathes meditatively through eclectic sound design.

In The First Wave

With calming spirit, Ümlaut’s new album “In the First Wave” explores the reciprocity of silence and noise. As an atmospheric sound poem, the breathing spaces between sounds, textures and minimal beats are the blank lines. The in-betweens are important elements. As the album unfolds, the listener will begin to discern language in the spaces. The imagination is sparked. The title, “In the First Wave,” references a beginning – whether to time and space, or discovery of a new way of listening. Imagine yourself in a satellite listening station, tuned into the gradually evolving structures of planetary waves. Regard the album as an electronic shuttle through planetary influences. Imagine. Receive. The mind expands.

Musique de Film

MUSIQUE DE FILM is a collection of soundtrack compositions for a series of short films created by me. The films and the sounds exist on 2 planes: first: the sound breathes life into silent images of motion; and second: pure sound invites the listener to conjure his or her own mental imagery. When I create a film, I first strip out all sound. I want to first tell a silent visual story. A point of inspiration is Brian Eno’s song Spider and I: “Spider and I / Sit watching the sky / On our world without sound.” Once my filmic story is complete (my world without sound), I create a complimentary audio world – the soundtrack to this silent world – as standalone music. By means of shifting sounds and textures, my goal is to touch upon beauty and emotion, through the use of loop-based repetition, textural nuances, hushed tones and droning backdrops that fade off into considered silence. These swirling masses of sound and beat-less borders transcend, at times, my weightless approach. All the more, if I add industrial noise, this layering process helps to retain the delicate beauty of the sound.

Vasco da Gama

Vasco da Gama is the debut release by Jeff Düngfelder aka Ümlaut. It is music of exploratory thought, influenced by his multicultural neighborhood in Queens, New York City. Born of an ever expanding inner journey, mystery and chance mixed with dissonance, memory and imperfection carve a singular path throughout his songs. Using computer-as-instrument, and patching together fragments of sounds, textures and a warm palette of noise, a richly layered experience initiates a journey to an unknown. An amalgam of found acoustics tweaks the listener’s imagination, opening it to reflection and discovery. Careful and deliberate manipulation of sound seamlessly juxtaposes the digital world with field recordings merging the universal with the personal. Thinking becomes the means of travel.

Discography

Intelligent Life

Not As Two Separate Things

Like the winding brook on the album’s cover, a deceptive intimacy cuts a path through the tonal and textural elements of Intelligent Life’s new release, “Not As Two Separate Things.” Composer and arranger Jeff Düngfelder’s relocation to the countryside has softened some of the edges sharpened by NYC life. His hours spent experimenting and manipulating electronic layers continues to raise the bar of the trio’s compositional architecture. Mike Brown on bass and Josh Trinidad on horn lend mystery and musicianship of the highest order. Their sultry, subliminal sounds waft and float and hover, like an ablution to a sacred vessel. Measured, deliberative and immersive, the musical vibe lures the listener into Intelligent Life’s crucible of organic sweetness and lush ambience. Düngfelder, Brown and Trinidad’s singular, innovative interplay of composition, performance and improvisation creates a euphonious landscape uniquely their own.

VIDEOS:

Slowly, and then all at once

And you utterly will become

The Nothing That Is

Envision a bird gliding over smooth waters and the refracted movement of its reflection. More sound poem than traditional album, stripped down to essentials, the essence of “The Nothing That Is” illumines without distractions. Brown’s masterful, reverberant bass line crosshatches and punctuates Dungfelder’s undulating wave of textural electronica, sound experiments and quixotic percussions as the emotional eloquence of Trinidad’s trumpet lifts the tracks to lofty heights with a deceptively seductive and pleading intimacy. Awash in joy, in languor, in comfort, in mystery, the trio’s collaboration is the manifestation of meditative musicianship and heart. A minimal masterpiece. Float… in The Nothing That Is.

Twilight Falls

“Twilight Falls” captures in fine form the trio that is Intelligent Life. Emotionally deep, texturally enhanced and subtly complex, this is an oddly beautiful, transfixing album expertly fused in its execution. The three musicians perform as a continuum of one. Accompaniment is abandoned. The rich harmonics and spectral winds of their sound environment sensually hover above a moving platform of droning undertones. Reaching for higher heights, the trio’s fascination with nature is deftly interwoven with the cultural inspirations and rituals of city life.

Sounds and tones endlessly circulate. From amorphous, evocative vignettes to rousing, propulsive pinnacles, each track seamlessly swirls into a new consciousness as if silently recalibrating the equilibrium derived from the preceding track. A luftpause separates each track; the thread of melody is never lost. No note is wasted. No gesture is gratuitous. Moving, contemplative music, it is both melancholic and hopeful. Simultaneously ethereal and earthy, the instruments slide into a groove amid all the trickery and interplay. Düngfelder’s electronics, Brown’s contrabass and Trinidad’s trumpet soulfully mesh together into a singular sound. No one takes the lead.

A tightly coherent, meandering improvisation could describe their musical dialogue. An interlacing of mysticism, epiphanies and inner reflection, where meditative ambience meets graceful expectation meets an undercurrent of insistence. “Twilight Falls” is an essential consummation of the trio’s six previous albums.

Between The Shadow

“It seems to be sitting still in space, waiting for us to run into it.” The opening words of “Between the Shadow,” the new album by Intelligent Life, featuring Jeff Dungfelder on electronics, Mike Brown on contrabass and Joshua Trinidad on trumpet, summon you into its parallel universe; a universe where an atmospheric forest of whispering details, shifting sounds and morphing textures provide a protective canopy. In this sonic galaxy, time warps, tones ping and bells ring. Bathed in a shape-shifting lushness of arboreal light, you experience “a world that is every bit as alive as the one that you and me are in right here and right now.”

Spoken words shadow-play in your headspace. They inform and deepen and shape-shift your communal understanding. What is real may not necessarily be so. Isolation sets transformation in motion. In your personal mind-movie, hushed tones and droning backdrops fade slowly into silence and lets your imagination take over. “Evolutionary sleepers are united by this biological program on our hard drive.” The promise of Intelligent Life is out there.

Receptacle

Three A.M – The dream is not over…

As above, so below; as within, so without; as the universe, so the soul….” Sound, by its very nature, harmonizes with the principles of Hermetic Law. When fueled with positive intent, the components of sound possess the power to transform. Vibrations penetrate. They electrify and tweak the brain. Sound can change how we perceive the world—if only for a single minute; single hour; or single day. Now, at the close of another year of the pandemic, the goal of “Intelligent Life” is to send forth positive energy that promises of a better world through inspired sound. On this, the final day of 2021, we humbly offer, “Receptacle”. Sit back, close your eyes, dissolve the boundaries of your mind.

Beginner’s Mind

Intelligent Life follows up their critically acclaimed album, “Thirty days of June,” with a deeper dive into the collective unconscious in their new release,” “Beginner’s Mind.” The setting of the album is artfully ambiguous. Divergent vocal specimens embedded within play with the listener’s perception of time, inferring an otherworldly future or impossible past. As expansive drones resound with unparalleled beauty, an intricate patchwork of melodic lines float to the surface of its sonic space, all of which slyly feels familiar. Perhaps, memories really do have a life of their own.

Düngfelder, Brown and Trinidad have musically created an atmosphere as delightful as it is mysterious. Sounds previously shelved in a library in some distant future are reimagined in a collage of modern minimalism. Found sound and electronic instrumentation diffuse, as if in a post-fourth-world spectral dream. With inclinations toward the abstract and innovative textural explorations, they have evolved into a world of sound uniquely their own. To categorize this album is impossible, but It is a perfect fit for the times in which we live.

Thirty Days Of June

On the heels of the success of “Lost in Translation”, Intelligent Life presents “Thirty days of June”, their third album of boundary defying experimental music, recorded during Covid-19 lockdown. Right from the start, opening track “And when the time comes” evokes a potent sense of time and place. Underground travel through the dark tunnels of the NYC subway system. A sudden stop. A forward lurch. The unseen but ever present East River churning dangerously above. The hypnotic sounds of the album continue and intensify with each subsequent track. “Collective memory”, “Summer solstice” and “With the way things are” smoothly seduce the listener while, at the same time, give nothing away. True to its title, “Mysteriously silent on the subject” weaves a musical path that brings a feeling of peace and wonder and the magic of being in “the moment.” Title track “Thirty days of June” helps you get through the isolating days of Covid, yet you may not be quite sure just how it does that. Therein lies the genius. After the final track, “It is the time”, when you are fully immersed in the out-of-body experience that is Intelligent Life, you will leave with the sense that everything will be alright. It may be lot to expect from an album, but “Thirty Days of June” delivers.

Lost In Translation

On the crest of “Everything is always the same”, Intelligent Life now presents their visionary second release, “Lost in Translation”. Joining the group is renowned trumpeter Joshua Trinidad, whose burnished tones and spellbinding improvisational skills beguiles the listener with an air of relaxed restraint. The alluring timbre of Brown’s contrabass gently floats the articulated notes of Trinidad’s trumpet, which then seamlessly interweave with the mystical texture of Düngfelder’s electronic world. Out of this fluidity of sound a new language is born. Boundaries are defused and the listener gets lost into an unchartered world.

Düngfelder, Brown and Trinidad merge their individual experiences and talents to produce meditative music with an edge. With a blend of idiosyncrasy, depth and the unexpected it is a unique palette not come across in most experimental albums.

Everything Is Always The Same

Intelligent Life makes its powerful debut with this genre-defying album. Ultimately unclassifiable and obsessively listenable, it is an ephemera of sound that defuse boundaries. A structural philosophy of experimental contrabass underscores the ambient, down-tempo and avant-garde components, which fluidly superimpose with the electronica. While the contrabass is clearly a foundational element, it serves more as a point of departure than a defining sonic envelope. Düngfelder & Brown take their disparate experiences and talents to attack convention. Alive with vivid colors they give the meditative music a real edge with the unexpected. It’s full of an idiosyncratic energy not found on most experimental albums. A brilliant debut.

Shelter In Place (We Don't Have A King Remix)

This newly released single is a remix of “Shelter In Place” from the upcoming Audiobulb album “Everything is always the same,” recorded during the Covid-19 lockdown in New York City. Joining the group for the first time on this remix is renowned trumpeter Joshua Trinidad. Adding his burnished tones and skillful improvisation to the mix, Trinidad establishes a seductive mood of edgy yet relaxed restraint. As Covid-19 continues to ravage the world, this song explores the absurd ramifications of politics vs science and common sense during this ongoing global tragedy.