Category: music

A few days ago I happened to stumble across a list of Eight Great Minimal Electronic Records You Need to Hear. Minimal techno – if it’s what you could call the music on the list – is something I haven’t listened to a great deal so I thought I’d have a listen.

First up is Königsforst, a 1998 album by GAS, long-term project of Wolfgang Voight.

Long, looping ambient tones evoke an unsettling almost disorienting effect that’s only increased by samples of what seems to be classical music (I would imagine it’s something like Wagner or Berg) with a steady, often muffled techno beat-ever present, a little like hearing someone playing techno in their car far off, somewhere across a wooded landscape. The closest things I can compare it with is the eerie Badalamenti Twin Peaks music or the hauntological Ghost Box. It’s enthralling in a sinister way.

The ambient nature of the pieces on Königsforst also make it difficult, I believe, to term it music in the usual sense. It’s far more a series of sound textures/layers which evoke some emotional (or aesthetic?) response.

Aphotic and portentous, Richard Skelton’s new album has been played around these parts for a week. It’s magnificent. I’d even go so far to say that it’s a significant piece of modern music.

The gloomy, droning soundscape evoked by Skelton on this album is perfect for both this time of the year as Autumn turns its face towards the winds of approaching Winter and for the ongoing period of uncertainty and apprehension we’re enduring. It seems to suit my current sensibility and on more than one occasion over the last couple of days I’ve found myself becoming entranced by the music in an almost tuned-out, hypnotic state. A sense of drowning in the tonal darkness of it all.

It’s certainly heavy. There’s an overall sense of dread, of dissolution of natural sound. (This afternoon, Alice made me turn it off; she found the sounds were causing her to feel anxious and unable to collect her thoughts.) It’s certainly dense and textural. The first half of the album seems affirming. Warm even. For Either Deadened or Undeadened is – for me – the most beautiful piece on the album. The second half becomes darker. Almost industrial. The distortion and feedback builds to a point that is intensely affective. The other track that’s stunning is For The Application Of Fire, an eerie, pulsing piece.

Phantom Limb describe the album like this:

Over the past sixteen years, Richard Skelton has developed a signature sound, often comprised of strings, piano and other acoustic instrumentation. Since 2013 he has increasingly buried these organic sources in layers of detritus and static. The process, as he articulates it, is to use signal-degradation as a means of reflecting the processes of decay and transformation in the natural world. His music has been placed alongside giants of experimental music, such as Brian Eno, Harold Budd, Stars Of The Lid, William Basinski. 

Just when you thought it was literally the end of civilisation, The Young Knives (or, more properly) Young Knives without the “The” any more have released a new album, Barbarians. And. It’s. Rather. Good. Indeed. Their last album was something like 7 years ago. It’s very very welcome.

Their earlier quirky and delightfully melodic songs – which still get a lot of play around these parts – have given way to some incredibly dark sounding tunes that are eerily menacing but equally amusing. Their description as “self-aware nihilistic miserabilists” is evident in their very odd, disturbing music videos which are certainly worth watching.

I’ve been working from home today and been playing their videos on Youtube in the background and it’s been fascinating to watch their trajectory from early songs like Rollerskater and The Decision to Society for Cutting Up Men on the new album. There’s no sense that they’ve ever settled on a formula and, if anything, seem to have gone out of their way to continually reinvent themselves.

Their online launch party is a thing of beauty and excellence in itself:

Standout tracks: Kristallo, Heimatklange, Tanzmuzik.

Ralf und Florian was the fourth Kraftwerk album. Like Tone Float, Kraftwerk 1 and Kraftwerk 2, it’s not available for listening other than Youtube or a bootleg. Schneider called their first 4 albums “archaeology” and there seems to have been no desire to re-release their early material.

It’s a shame. Before today I’d not knowingly heard any of the tracks from Ralf und Florian. I’ve listened to it through twice and have it on now as I’m writing this. I think it’s great and, in some ways, it’s a stronger overall album to its follow-up, Autobahn. It’s Kraftwerk at their warmest: bright, softer and more melodic.

What strikes me most about this album is how modern many of the tracks sound. There are moments I could imagine Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin listening to the arcadian melodies before turning to their recording equipment. Or even Richard James with a track like Tanzmuzik (I’m thinking Avril 14th but could be reaching there).

It’s the first album where the pair use a synthesiser rather than process sounds made by other instruments. The photo on the back cover of the LP shows Ralf and Florian in their studio and it’s possible to see a Mini Moog synth among the electronic equipment (there’s also flutes and what looks like a guitar). The UK album cover is very different from the German, with a circuit board print design.

Ralf und Florian has 6 tracks. Elecktrisches Roulette is a concoction of tinny Moog keyboards, clattering drums and a variety of electronic sounds. There’s a ghostly melody that reminds me of a Boards of Canada motif. Tongebirge is a slow – almost ambient – delightful piece of echoey flute arpeggios. Kristallo is a tonally anxious track that underpins freeform harpsichord arpeggios with the choppy rhythm of a bass. Is this Kraftwerk’s first completely electronic piece of music. Heimatklange has a simple, almost chamber music melody for piano and flute. It seems to me to be the most ambient of the music on this album (Without looking it up, I wonder when this album was released in relation to Brian Eno’s conception of ambient music. It’s certainly around the same time.)

On the B-side are the two remaining tracks. Tanzmuzik is a charming piece of dance music. Amid the wooden and metallic percussive noises it presents the duo’s first vocals. Of all the tracks on the album this is the most like later Kraftwerk. The final track, Ananas Symphonie, is a 14 minute delightfully lazy piece dominated by a dreamy slide guitar. In the background you can hear the occasional use of a vocoder which would later become a Kraftwerk trademark.

In his biography of Kraftwerk, Pascal Bussy says that while there are distinctive elements of Kraftwerk evident on this album, they’re not yet fully realised as Kraftwerk:

It is true that their ideas had now been boiled down to a more recognisable shape with the inclusion of some vocals and sequenced keyboards, but somehow the LP is still not a conclusive whole despite being more image conscious. The feeling of the music is still of a film soundtrack variety, with only a slight inclination toward a pop music mentality or lyrical structure.

standout track: Autobahn

It was the news of Florian Schneider’s death that compelled me to spend some time listening again to Kraftwerk. I suspect that Schneider was the source of David Stubbs’ identification of the “deep sardonic comic sensibility that always lurks beneath the surface of Kraftwerk”. If you’ve ever watched videos of Kraftwerk performing live, it’s hard not to miss Schneider’s rascally smile or that comic, knowing glint in his eye while the other mensche-maschine play impassively.

I’m sure my first encounter with electronic music was watching something like Tomorrow’s World on BBC One as a child or Popcorn played whenever an automated factory assembly line was shown on screen. Around that time I was vaguely aware of Kraftwerk, a strange group of robotic German gentlemen who stood at synthesisers stiffly while performing their music. I remember being aware of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop as well mostly in terms of the sound effects for programmes like Doctor Who and Blake’s 7. At some point in my childhood I had an album called Out of This World by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop with sound effects with titles like Laser Gun, Five Bursts and Electric Door Open.

Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, released in November 1974, is an album whose impact can’t be underestimated. There really isn’t anything like Autobahn before this album. Of course there was a great deal of nascent popular electronic music (various Moog-music, perhaps Wendy Carlos) but nothing that entered popular cultural awareness in this way before. Supposedly, this is the record that caused Bowie to alter his rock trajectory and transition to Low and Heroes. It also led to the synth-pop that dominated the early 1980s with musicians like John Foxx, Gary Numan, Ultravox, OMD, The Human League and even bands like New Order and Japan.

For something the was considered futuristic over 45 years ago, Autobahn still sounds incredibly modern (even if retro-futuristic). The a-side, Autobahn, captures the enjoyment of an everyday mundane activity elevated to an ideology. A car door slams shut, an ignition and the engine proceeds the actual music which grounds the music in the everyday. In fact, there’s an almost zen-like fascination with the everyday. The mix of Moog and electronic rhythms created by modified Maestro Rhythm King drum machine which initiates “Kraftwerk’s benign celebration of automaton” (Stubbs) – is trance-inducing. The vocoded, harmonised lyrics – which I’ve seen described as a Teutonic homage to the Beach Boys – have a deliberate froideur:

wir fahr’n fahr’n fahr’n
auf der autobahn

While the a-side revels in its warm celebration of a daytime Volkswagon journey along the industrialised modern setting, the b-side is a pastoral journey through night (comets, midnight and a morning walk). The b-side reveals Ralf and Florian’s kosmische origins. There’s a mix of quite ominous sounds with a light, optimistic flute as well as natural (almost ambient) sounds layered in the background.

I almost missed this. Wire has a second album, 10:20, out this year. And it’s absolutely brilliant.

Unlike Mind Hive, their most recent album – which I thought was their strongest in years – this one seems to act as a compilation of re-recorded, reworked songs from old albums or songs that didn’t make the final cuts. The band call these “stray” tracks that have evolved over the years through love performance. Half were recorded in 2010 and the rest more recently.

There’s a less aggressive, calmer – maybe supremely assured feel to 10:20 than Hive Mind. Among the tracks I love the dreamy sound of Wolf Collides and the final track, Over Theirs, seems to me to recall Wire’s incredibly interesting music of the 1980s.

The final few minutes of the album are mesmerising.