Review Summary: 1000 butterflies in the stomach
This site aside, there’s been a bunch of interesting write-ups about this record. That’s possibly due to the interesting dualities (analog-digital, minimal-maximal, sensual-sterile) inviting lovely, poetic prose. There’s also plenty of potential word count padding in the unorthodox Thomas Brinkmann himself, let alone such curios as the themed tracklist and the album’s sibling,
A Certain Degree of Stasis. Like a lot of music that gets tagged as experimental, it’s also difficult to talk about this without discussing the - admittedly intriguing - concepts and process (the artist-as-researcher’s methodology). But let’s not dawdle with the high-minded stuff. The gut reaction is the vital part of this listening experience.
The visceral first impression is key here: nervousness. Tracks like “PSA”, “MEX”, and “LAS” are anxious in their understated, yet rigidly insistent arrangements. “LHR” opens with a nerve-wracking, dramatic use of a piano’s powerful timbre before engaging in a gruellingly maniacal, mechanical, protracted, rapid-fire use of the same powerful sound. (Do I have to resort to ‘hammering’?) This activity does lighten and eventually falter – for instance, a tentative and halting “VIE” presents the other extreme. Or is it perhaps clumsy reviewing to impose a human sentimentality and desire for narrative on an opaque piece of work? Maybe “VIE” is merely a functional flip of the reset switch after nearly a quarter-hour (unless you’ve got the vinyl) of consistently demanding music. Maybe it’s a purely corrective measure to restore the album’s sense of loud and soft dynamism. That’s the tricky thing with dissecting minimal and abstract music; it’s all too easy to ‘fill in the blanks’ with personal
fluff and pass it off as some kind of sensitive and discerning insight.
As I’ve been alluding to, this isn’t background music. It doesn’t flow smoothly or wax and wane in an organic way - or at least, not in the way I (the naïve listener) expected when I first heard the piano’s voice in “LHR”. But that in itself is the most obvious characteristic (or gimmick, arguably) of the record i.e. the subversion of a “proto-romantic” piano-sourced sound. However, Brinkmann also allows the arrangements to become frenetic and sustained, with ramshackle rhythms prolonged until overbearing and there’s actually something wonderful in that monstrous excess. A kind of ‘brutality’ is found in some of these compositions. This is due to the unsympathetically solid massing of chord clusters (even if the samples were originally ‘pretty’). In that respect, there’s a point of comparison to genres such as metal that typically strive for a ‘heaviness’ of dense sounds and intensity.
Of course the album does nearly run out of steam – it is long (76 minutes) with eighteen tracks (some of which are quite prolonged, minimal, and indistinct). It’s not surprising that the jittery edge wears off some, blunting the emotional affect. However, Brinkmann never quite lets the listener escape. It’s this immediate-level artist-listener play that makes this an excellent album. There are subtleties and intricacies in the selective use of higher-pitched skittering and repetitive, yet stuttering, employment of the lower registers. Similarly, the quieter tracks like “TLV” are really nice (an organ accompanied by audible crackling, just to keep experience a little off-kilter). “SFO” and “HEL” are blink-and-you’ll-miss-them reprieves of alien murmuring. The slithering subdermal electronics under “MAD” are a late arrival, injecting anxiety and amplifying the intensity once again. This culminates in “KIX”, a wave of too-precise, grotesquely excessive violence for the last minute and a half. As before, the conventional expectations of catch-and-release progression and smooth transitions are ignored. What could be the key-hammering (whoops), heart-pounding soundtrack to a film’s dramatic climax is actually the ignominious spasm of a malfunctioning machine and like that, we’re done.
