Various Artists – Berlin Electronics

Various Artists

4 miniCD – Absinth
This album’s artwork is immediately striking and very original: it is made of a foldable cardboard of good quality, hand shellacked by Renkel (with a dense acrylic bluish color), supplemented by four mini-cd’s in a diamond shape. It seems almost a punishment – the cd’s are identical, there is no further written sign or symbol that distinguishes them, and furthermore the tracks not tagged. It is only possible to decipher the individual projects by the different number of recordings. Annette Krebs: her single 15-minute long track starts very dilated, with scanty object sounds and a strange gong, incorporating radio interferences, hisses, hums, voices and tonal variations. The author affirms that all these materials can be structured differently, modulating the different parts according to the performative contexts of choice. The tension and the sense of surprise in the succession of sound events are predominant in this aural experience. The three Gilles Aubry’s tracks, in contrast, are built on rarefied yet vivid space sequences, revealing generative compositions based on micro-fragments, frequencies and feedback investigations, modulated in granular and thorny textures. Ignaz Schick, another sound artist from Berlin, contributes four tracks, skillfully manipulating organ envelopes, modulating suspended textures between electronic structures and improvisation with sensitive tonal changes and exotic juxtapositions. Last but not least, Andrea Ermke is focused on the many field recordings he has accumulated. They are snippets of urban daily life, mixed with naturalistic reverbs and accidental recordings of dialogues. Berlin is not the place for electronic dance hordes only. Here and now, the more abstract experimentation is still alive.