Pregled posta

Marketing

1 In Liebe dein 3:43
2 Girlande 3:47
3 Inselmoos 5:43
4 Fabelwein 5:05
5 Prinzregent 5:53
6 Kamee 3:59
7 Herold 3:32
8 Halmharfe 3:24
9 Arcona 5:05
10 Staunem im Fjord 3:33
11 Minne 2:09

Wunderbar. The most criminally neglected solo Roedelius album finally gets a proper CD release.

Selbstportrait was the first of five volumes of Roedelius keyboard vignettes progressively released by Sky Records in the early 1980s, just as Krautrock’s commercial sun dipped below the horizon, not to reappear in the public eye until after Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler. Even then, Cope overlooked these unassuming quiet self portraits while Sky lazily bunged volumes one and two into a single CD with tracks reshuffled or left out. So hats off to Bureau Buskies editions for faithfully restoring them with the addition of sleeve notes by Asmus Tietchens.

In the early 1980s, these rippling Zen pastorales were as radical for their time as any existential guitar thrash. Pale and fresh, like February flowers pushing out of cracks in asphalt, Roedelius softens Krautrock's industrial strength metronome into a grainy volksmusik all of his own. For trapped within the mechanically tumbling loops of these 18 Farfisa vignettes are sublime melodies with oblique hints of the school piano, Bach, fin-de-siecle organs, harps and accordions.

By boldly juxtaposing Krautrock’s brutalist mantras with classical and folk tradition, Selbstportrait confirms Roedelius among the finest native voices of post-War Germany. Here is a tone poet listening in to his own history and the clamour of voices and well-caught scraps of this and that which blow across his psyche. And the result is hypnotic and life-affirming.

From the moth-eaten brocade of German history, Roedelius extracts ancestral voices and transposes them into new settings with just a trace of the original left over. “Kamee” detunes his Farfisa to slightly off-key but chromatic settings so that his tumbling loops circle around ambiguous tonal centres delighting the ear with their timbral strangeness. For a minute it hovers between rhythm and pulse – seemingly undeveloped and unchanging, Cluster-like – inviting the question: “What’s the point of this?” The music seems hermetically sealed in its own space. Divorced from centuries of tradition. It seems to lack any linear harmonic structure where things develop, peak and resolve in some kind of way. But with the deep listening that Roedelius fans bring to his work, slowly and intermittently, an inner complexity opens out. Shifting from major to minor and back, muted colours fade in and out, like a quivering Rothko canvas. And, what’s that? It sounds like a hurdy-gurdy spooking the modernist repetitions.

It’s dance music for the head. Taking off from the odd and unfamiliar while interleaving it with oblique melodic nods to the past. Within a rigid gridlock of pattering tik-tak of keyboard drums, “Arcona” evokes the quirky syrupy melodies of Paul Hindemath’s Gebrauchsmusik. The analogue synth plinky-plonk of “Inselmoos” is pure plastic and fibreglass delight until a woozy melody opens a wormhole to Alpline folklore.

The composite effect of these 240-volt pastorales is exquisite. Like music for a hilltop view of patchwork fields, woods and streams that takes in asphalt, pylons, a nuclear power station. Past and present, urban and rural, inner and outer space neatly folding into each other.

In the original vinyl sleeve notes, Roedelius felt compelled to apologise for the lo-fi quality of these home-made tapes using a Revox reel-to-reel. He needn’t have bothered. Their 240-volt hiss and grainy resolution is equally suggestive of buzzing electronics or bacterial growth – and so applies the perfect finish to the album.

And now to pay tribute to the greatest pop album of all time ...

Heroin-fueled addiction and chemistry rife with turmoil between singer Brett Anderson and guitarist Bernard Butler led to an unparalleled album of tragic, dark and painful songs that are at times classical - The 2 Of Us and Still Life - gritty and noisy - This Hollywood Life and We Are The Pigs - beautiful - The Wild Ones - political - The Power - mesmerizing - Heroine - and epic - The Asphalt World. Anderson's drugged baritone singing soars to unfathomable heights. Butler's layers upon layers of overdubbed guitars pile on so thick the weight comes painfully close at times to collapsing the entire thread of the music but never does, and reaches epic proportions on the enormous cadenza of The Asphalt World before being joined by Anderson's powerful vocals ending in an explosion of sound and samples evoking a proper drug addict's and distraught lover's delusions.

Grandiose and at times seemingly over-the-top, the production afforded by Ed Buller was a major factor in the demise of the Anderson/Butler songwriting team that would then spell the end of this era of Suede. But he produced this album expertly, never too overworked or overdone. Guitar fuzz leads to classical piano strains leads to full-blown orchestral arrangements and within all he handled with absolute integrity.

The album art of a nude figure collapsed on a bed that, in Suede fashion is left ambiguous but that we can only assume is a man, symbolizes the tragic nature of the album, that or a personification of the ending of the last song Still Life from its enormous symphonic power that collapses in on itself with a final crash of cymbals and percussion and brings with it a close to the all-too-short era that was Suede with the Anderson/Butler force.

One reviewer mentioned "this album is best heard through headphones on a system turned up to a level not entirely healthy for one's ears. Even if you do go deaf as a result, chances are there's nothing much worth listening to after having sat through Suede's sophomore set." I can personally attest to blowing a pair of headphones whilst listening to The Asphalt World.

The entire album is one drug-induced frenzy. Tragically beautiful and heroic. Mesmerizing and larger-than-life. There are not enough superlatives to aptly describe this work of pure pop art, coming dangerously close to breaking out of kitsch, and symbolizing both the epitome and the demise of Brit Pop and the entire era, ushering in after it a new sound infused more with polished glam and less of the earlier disenchantment and tragic ideals. It represents the culmination of an era that has now been written into pop culture history, an era noted for its dark glam and obscene stylings that will always be Brit Pop.

and other such musings ... I digress