reviews
Thomas Lehn/Marcus Schmickler - Navigation Im Hypertext/Kölner Kranz
German synthesizer musicians Thomas Lehn and Marcus Schmickler have been playing together for quite some time now, long enough that one might expect their interaction to have grown a bit stale. They first turned heads (and scrambled brains) with their Erstwhile duo disc, BART, an unforgettable washing-machine roar of an album, then stretched and expanded their sound by adding AMM founder Keith Rowe to the mix for the muscular musique concrète of Rabbit Run. It’s always been well-known that both Lehn and Schmickler are more than capable of playing quiet, sensitive improv, even with musicians whose range is on the threshold of audibility. For whatever reason, though, their collaborations together (excepting a whispery quartet with Rowe and Japanese minimalist Toshimaru Nakamura) have usually tended towards the dark, abrasive, and deafening.
This new set of albums, one on CD and one available only on vinyl, aims to mark off some new territory for the duo as they head into the studio as a pair for the first time since BART. Navigation Im Hypertext will certainly seem like a bold departure for those expecting a reprise of the last Lehn/Schmickler duo outing, and perhaps even for those familiar with the broader range of their music outside this combo. It is a measured, temperately paced recording, with a broad dynamic range; nothing here approaches the cataclysmic roar of BART, though there are many frantic bursts of activity to balance out the stretches of calm and quietude. In its style and sound, the album is more reminiscent of early electronic music than anything either of these musicians has recorded before: the processed squiggles and bloops sound positively retro at times, while a few of the more obviously digital sections sound annoyingly like outtakes from some kind of Nintendo soundtrack (or a 90s Mego album, for that matter).
These hat-tips to electronic forebears can sometimes be jarring, but it’s not necessarily an insult to say that the album owes a lot to early electronic composition. The 10-minute opening track, which judiciously spaces Lehn’s popping, reverb-laced outbursts amidst stretches of heavy silence and textured undercurrents of sine waves and static, is one of the duo’s best pieces. There is a tense beauty to this music, and to the best parts of the album in general, that brings to mind the low-key synth musings of Eliane Radigue. At times, a thick bass rumble will underpin an encroaching semi-melodic fuzz that threatens to (but never quite does) explode into a full-on noise assault. Elsewhere, machine vibrations, sputtering and mechanically rhythmic, give way to sine shrieks and modem hum, before it all subsides into a distant foreboding drone, like stormclouds forming on the horizon. On the strength of passages like these, Navigation Im Hypertext, despite its occasional missteps, succeeds at stretching the boundaries of the Lehn/Schmickler pairing.
It is undeniable, however, that of the two albums, the vinyl-only Kölner Kranz is the more successful and satisfying recording. If Navigation Im Hypertext attempts to find new ground on which to stage the musicians’ collaboration, Kölner Kranz stakes out familiar territory and then razes the surroundings flat, not so much building upon the intensity of BART as sounding like several copies of that album being played at the same time. The jump in density and complexity is truly that exponential. There is hardly a single space to breathe or pause for processing over the course of this album’s exhausting 36 minutes, unless one counts the necessary lull when turning the record over (which may be why it was conceived as an LP in the first place). It is hard to imagine a musical space more crowded and suffocating, and yet there is little that’s chaotic about this blustery music. Every sound seems perfectly placed, deliberately controlled, and the wealth of details adds to the complexity rather than simply accumulating into a dull, undifferentiated roar.
There is life and passion in every inch of this album (and yes, there’s a tendency to think of it in terms of geographical space, so tactile and three-dimensional is the sound field the duo has created here). The sound is busy and nearly deafening, but never aimlessly so. Seemingly separate layers — thick digital squalls; looped chunks of ragged noise; insectile drones; clusters of percussive clicks — come together to form a unified, overwhelming whole that continually challenges the listener to keep pace. This is exciting, visceral music that nevertheless retains a carefully calibrated sense of control.
~Ed Howard
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Bags on a roll, with Baran and Howard turning in pieces like this! More! More!
I was SO frustrated that I had only 250 words to cover these two albums for Wire. I take your point about the LP Ed, but oddly enough I found (find) myself going back to the CD more than I thought I would.
Anyway, any serious improv / EAI head needs BOTH
I want to echo Dan’s encouragement of fresh voices on the Bags page. Welcome Paul and Ed, and thanks for the cogent reviews thus far.
“Navigation Im Hypertext will certainly seem like a bold departure for those expecting a reprise of the last Lehn/Schmickler duo outing, and perhaps even for those familiar with the broader range of their music outside this combo.” - Ed Howard.
Schmickler’s “Altars of Science” record from last year is not entirely unlike the “Navigations” disc, I think, at least in relation to the vaguely retro electronics and effects vibe you mention, though thankfully we’re now free of the endless overlapping glissando effects. I couldn’t ultimately get into either record–both seem oddly bleak and drab–though certainly there are isolated disruptive moments on the duo piece that make it less dreary. But what to make of individual pieces like the strangulated and heavily echoed tones on “Neuer Titel 15″? Seems like a very meagre offering outside the context of the whole piece. At times the drone or loop pieces (like “Neuer Titel 2″) edge the music close to 80s post-industrial and ambient groups like Nocturnal Emissions and Zoviet*France.
The “Navigation” disc’s disorienting structuring into tiny and diverse fragments and its unusual numbering suggests that the pieces have maybe been re-assembled non-linearly or randomly, and could be played that way; possibly another nod to the formal methods of 1950s classical modernism and “open form” (as well as to “Rabbit Run.”) So the abrupt segues remain the most engaging part of it for me, usually having the effect of jolting me back to attention after my mind had wandered. Also, the division into very short fragments is something “Navigation” has in common with a few other recent “EAI”-ish records (notably Trio Sowari’s “Shortcut” on Potlatch), so I returned to it a few times to hum and haw about that aspect, at least. I think there’s something in what what Dan says about being drawn back to the CD, maybe for that reason.
I agree that the LP’s longer, looser pieces are more enjoyable, but they’re still not quite as great and unbridled as Lehn’s earlier solo synth record “Feldstärken”!
These two seem like pretty big events, I have been playing both of them pretty often.
This duo was one of the only EAI concerts I have enjoyed. I seem to far prefer it in recorded form.
I have also been revisiting BART.
Damn fine rekkid, that Bart. Funny, I never asked Tom or Marcus about the title. A homage to the Bay Area Rapid Transit system? Or the Simpsons? I suppose if they go on to release on called Subway or Homer, we’d know.
Thanks for reminding me to look out my copy of Feldstarken too, Ruairi (& welcome back), which was sandwiched between Prince Lasha’s Firebirds and Lê Quan Ninh’s Ustensiles. Time to give them another spin too.
Bart means ‘beard’ in German, another “hat-tip to electronic forebears” to use Ed’s phrase.
Also you can’t help but think of “einen Bart haben”, “to have a beard”, which means something old-hat.
Beard, hat-tip.. have a beard.. old-hat.. HAT AND BEARD! Out To Lunch!
Come to think of it, the best translation might be “long in the tooth”. Which leads us straight to Rabbit run, and from there to Johnny Hodges. The amount of references to a dead music is amazing…