Nora Schultz: Now, / Charlemagne Palestine

“Now, having mostly air left, they thought of making kites.”

Now, is not only a measure of time. It is the hinge of an argument. It holds the present open and lets a sequence tip forward. Each utterance lodges something in the moment and, at the same time, releases it onward. It is both pause and propulsion—an interval that leans into consequence.

Now, arrives as an announcement. Not as a call for attention, but as the quiet signal that something is about to begin, that the next gesture is already forming. It is spoken again and again, each time marking another turn—another fold, another added weight, another surface brought into question. We build from these small declarations. Each decision enters the room with the force of a beat.

That beat is not metaphorical. It is a drum: skin pulled, metal set trembling, sticks conducting pressure from one point to another. Now, becomes audible in the tension between materials, in their minute shifts, in the resonance that grows when they resist or when they give. It does not announce an end, but a continuation; it sets the pace at which the work finds itself.

A torch flares and tin releases its weight. Fibreglass flexes against the hand’s expectation—the sudden lift of a sheet of paper testing the air. A material argument.

“Now, what is a kite compared to a bird?
Or a drum?”

To mark the opening of Now,, another now is sounded. Charlemagne Palestine enters with Partingggg Schlingingggg – a church-organ improvisation within Schlingen Blängen, the long-form cycle he has developed since the 1970s. Over decades, this work has learned its language through duration: vibrating intensities, the slow stacking of tones, the pressure of sound accumulating in air and body. Conceived for Tom Engels’s farewell as Artistic Director of the Grazer Kunstverein, Partingggg Schlingingggg turns Palestine’s sound world toward a moment of transition – holding those present inside a shared interval of listening for one last time.