REVIEWS

Oneohtrix Point NeverThe opening track of Returnal sounds something like an extended cartoon explosion. Percussion rattles off like out-of-control machine guns, a whole range of 'special effect' type sounds are deployed from machine noises to self-consciously-electronic beeps blasts and whistles. A vaguely muezzin-like voice calls out over the buzzing, crackling chaos, is engulfed by the barrage of sound and then re-emerges towards the end. Although impressive in it's own right, this track is at odds with the music on the rest of this collection. Opening the disc this way seems deliberately confrontational. Maybe not always a bad strategy, but I can imagine may listeners skipping straight to the warm, enveloping organ drones of 'Describing Bodies'.

Like a lot of drone-based music, most of the tracks here work best played loud enough to be experienced as bodily vibration rather than just through the ears. This is music to be enveloped by, surrounded and surrendered to. As such, most of the pieces here feel a little short at between four and six minutes long. The gentle washes of 'Stress Waves' could be expanded to an entire CD's duration without complaint from this listener. The longest track 'Pelham Island Road' is in this respect the most satisfying, but also the track that is most redolent of another artist. The fuzzy harpsochord-like sounds and slow distorted drift are strongly reminiscent of Fennesz, but manage to also carry the distinctive sonic thumbprint of their creator. The title track 'Returnal' features heavily-processed vocals which smear themselves across the speakers appealingly, reminding the listener of pop music, but without pop music's essential immediacy.

 Moments of Returnal skirt close to being so gentle and reassuring they could be mistaken for an extract from somebody's New Age meditation compilation. Perhaps the abrasive opening track is an attempt to head off such criticism before the listener is allowed access to the main body of the album. If that is the case, then I would argue that such a strategy is misguided. The most successful parts of this recording embrace the potentially cheesy nature of analogue synthesisers and present the listener with a wash of sound that is both somehow comforting and melancholy. The sweetness of this music is its strength and there is enough depth and grain here to satisfy anyone who cares to listen a little deeper. -- Nick Ilott

:: Oneohtrix Point Never/Returnal - Editions Mego/A-Musik.

at dawnEs ist wenig zu lesen über den gebürtigen Schweden Dan Fröberg. Wenn aber doch fallen sichtlich oft die Worte Freiheit, Kreativität und Genialität. - Ein begrifflich starkes Dreiergespann, das sich zu bedingen scheint und dabei immense Erwartungen an den sogenannten „Wild Man Of The Arts“ (sic! Label iDEAL) stellt. Das zwei Kompositionen umfassende Album „At Dawn We Fall Down The Stairs“, das zeitgleich mit „The Existence Of Do-Ti-La-So-Fa-Mi-Re-Do is Everything!“ (iDEAL 096) erschien, ist formal zuerst aber etwas auf keinen Fall: wild. Der Sound, der zumeist aus der Tonschichtungen von Glasinstrumenten und Field-Recordings besteht, repräsentiert das komplette Gegenteil zu einer solchen Assoziation. Sphärisch, filigran und unendlich gestreckt, füllen Klänge den Raum bis in den letzten Winkel. Aufgenommen wurden die Stücke in Mexiko, wovon kunstvoll eingebundene Passagen in Form von Stimmengewirr auf spanisch oder Monologe von akzenthaftem Englisch zeugen. So mutet der zweite Teil des Albums „Hat Down Wee Owl Oul Drown Death Stares“ wie eine vertonte poetische Satz-Collage an, die besonders spirituelle Themen anspricht; Von den Indios, der Natur, der Existenz oder Übernatürlichkeit ist dort die Rede. Im Kern geht es hier kaum um eine bloße experimentelle Verknüpfung von Musik und Text als vielmehr um eine tiefgehende, akustische Auseinandersetzung mit einem Phänomen: Fröbergs Tape-Recorder als Speicher von Feldaufnahmen ist so gleichermaßen In- und Output-Medium einer kulturellen Feldforschung. -- Eileen Seifert.

:: Dan Fröberg/At Dawn We All Fall Down The Stairs - iDEAL Recordings/A-Musik

staubgold 100These two releases featuring Staubgold label head Markus Detmer mark the label's 99th and 100th releases. As such they can be seen as both a backward glance towards ground that the label has already covered and also perhaps a map to the regions that will be explored in the future.

As Klangwart, Detmer is joined in his sonic explorations by Timo Reuber. The pair craft slowly evolving electronic surfaces of sound with at least as much attention paid to sonic grain and texture as to more traditional ideas about rhythm and pitch. Although the high frequencies employed can occasionally verge on abrasive, perhaps a deliberate toying with the listener's comfort zones, the overall impression is very much of sonic lushness. Even on tracks such as 'Schnappschuss', where a great deal of sonic detail is presented simultaneously, each part has a carefully assigned space within the sound spectrum and the warmth of the bass and carefully controlled echo effects envelop the listeners ears. There isn't a great deal of conventional drum sounds here, with minimal synths often acting as a kind of tuned bass drum. Much of the rhythm is created by looped synthesisers and where there are explicit 'drum' sounds they tend to mimic hand percussion rather than a full traditional kit.

The mood shifts, often almost imperceptibly slowly, between a sort of blissed out bucolic electronia that brings to mind 70s classics by Cluster and Brian Eno while subtly updating and complicating the sound for the new century, and a crawling sense of foreboding that nods at Dubstep with its deep cavernous bass and music concrete and film soundtrack music with its employment of many disparate, often clashing textures and elements. 'Moloch' is the darkest track here, with an obsessive beat that evokes the ideas of fire sacrifice suggested by the title. The upper register synth hooks, bending up like some sort of slowed down and sonically degraded riffs from an old hardcore techno record, place the listener on the dancefloor, albeit a paranoid and strung out dark reflection of how the dancefloor is commonly imagined. 'Frühtau' in contrast, washes over the ears in warm and blissful waves; an organ delineates a slow moving series of chord changes; high harmonics shimmer out hints of ice-cream-van-melody while slow filter sweeps create an expansive mood as the music gently builds and builds.

These contrasts are the heart of this music. There is a clear thread of romanticism and nostalgia for bygone days, of which the nods towards psychedelic music's appropriation of non-Western musics in 'Wellenbad' is only the most obvious example. However underneath the bucolic idyll of tracks such as 'Schnappschuss'  lurks the machine, drilling and grinding away with slow but inevitable progress towards the listeners consciousness. 'Schnappschuss' begins with a beeps and blips of electronic noises that simultaniously evoke birdsong and a malfunctioning computer as imagined by the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop before the grinding, mechanical bass begins to emerge, chewing away underneath the synthesised forest. This is electronic music that problematises and questions the ideas of technology. In contrast to the way groups like Kraftwerk once presented a vision of utopia, Klangwart's response to our increasingly digitally-dependant daily lives is far more ambivalent and no less interesting.

100 Jahre Einsamkeit is a mix album with selections chosen by Markus Detmer from across Staubgold's discography. Including 21 tracks and over 70 minutes in length it has the potential to cover a great deal of musical ground. For the first half of the disc the tracks move quickly with few sticking around for more than two or three minutes. 'I begin to Know the Map' by Mapstation begins things with birdsong, subtle beats and a distorted voice, setting up an atmosphere that is somehow eerie but also laid back. This mood is continued by the tracks that follow, with the rhythms getting increasingly funky until Alejandro Franov's 'Sudan', which flirts with a 'middle eastern' vibe that sounds somewhat kitschy in this context, although not in a bad way. 'Oudische' continues the theme, but the impassioned vocals lend it both greater emotional punch and seriousness. Styles and genres then begin change with increasing frequency and the beats become more bombastic. Curse ov Dialect and Dälek add rapping to the mix, while The Flying Lizard and Zulu bring dancehall flavours. The most unexpected transition is to Ekkehard Ehers 'Ain't no Grave', where his cut ups of acoustic blues singing and guitar stand in stark sonic contrast to much of the material around them.

Towards the end of the mix, tracks begin to stretch out more and singing begins to take a more prominent role. Tracks by Leafcutter John, Sun, Kammerflimmer Kollektief and Jasmina Maschina appropriate ideas from vintage pop, rock and folk music, but these ideas are filtered through technology until blurred and smudged like a 10th generation photocopy or audio cassette. Individual words are often indistinct and the singers seem somehow numbed. The many moments of beauty here are suffused with yearning, but also dreamlike, separated from worldly concerns. By the time Ekkehard Ehlers takes things out with the slow repetitive organ phrases and spoken word of 'Woolf Phrase' any urge to tap ones' feet has been replaced by an urge to lie back and let the waves of sound wash over.

As a showcase for Staubgold's breadth and vision as a record label 100 Jahre Einsamkeit is certainly impressive. More importantly it stands on its own as a collection of music. Making a body of music this disparate work together is a considerable achievement. The sequencing of the tracks and mixing is impeccable, as might be expected. There are sufficient shifts in mood and texture to keep things interesting, but also enough common ground between artists to lend a musical logic to the shifts between individual tracks. The focus on the texture of sound apparent in Sommer is continued throughout every track in this collection. This is music made by people who care deeply about the intricacies of each high hat hit or reverb bloom and each track presents the ear with rich and interesting new juxtapositions of elements.  Like the very best multi-genre mix albums, such as David Holmes' fantastic Essential Mix, 100 Jahre Einsamkeit has a very personal feel, a little like something one might receive in the post from a particularly tasteful and talented friend. Together with Sommer it serves as a refreshing reminder of the endless fields of sonic possibility still to be discovered. -- Nick Ilott

:: Klangwart/Sommer - Various/100 Jahre Einsamkeit - Staubgold/Indigo. 

rm74-reflexEin schreiender Flughund im freien Fall. Das ist das Bild, welches auf dem fünften Soloalbum des Schweizers Reto Mäder a.k.a. RM74 prangt. Aufgenommen hat es Phillip Nesmith - Fotograf und ehemaliger Fallschirmjäger in Kriegen der Jetztzeit, deren Momente er auf atmosphärischen, dunklen Bildern festhält. Jahrhunderte alt wirken diese Oberflächen, wie Relikte aus einer Zeit als die Fotografie noch magisch war und Seelen raubte. Die Technik der Ferrotypie ist ein antiquarisches Direkt-Positiv-Verfahren, bei der ein Negativ erzeugt wird, um als Unikat zu bestehen. In jenem aufwändigen Prozess hergestellt vermitteln sie zugleich Flüchtigkeit und ewige Gültigkeit, vereinen Zeitgenössisches und Historie. Nesmith Flughund schickt einen Bedeutungshorizont voraus, der nicht nur von seiner Idee lebt, sondern fast physisch spürbar wird. Das Ding an sich, das was dieses Tier auszumachen scheint, ist gebannt in einer feinen Textur von schwarz, weiss und grau. Die dichte musikalische Atmosphäre auf „Reflex“ entspricht dieser Visualisierung, sie ist der Spiegel, der ein verstörend-emotionales Bild von unserer Welt zurückwirft. In einem Labyrinth aus arithmetisch geschichteten Tönen ist jedes Detail wohl platziert und überlegt, jedoch mit einer – wenn auch düsteren – Leichtigkeit, die nie angestrengt oder gar anstrengend zu hören ist. Gitarren vereinen sich mit knarrender Elektronik zur harmonischen Fläche. Einer Fläche, über die der geneigte Hörer - gleich einem geflügelten Wesen – gleitet, irgendwo „Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea“ and „The Garden of Lower Lights.“ -- Eileen Seifert.

:: RM74/Reflex - utechrecords.com/Drone.