Third in the series following the reed and string selections from the same city, “Berlin Drums” likewise offers four 3” discs from individual musicians, this time of the percussive persuasion. As before, producer Marcus Liebig casts a fairly wide stylistic net, though not always to the set’s benefit.
Two of the four recordings, however, are excellent. Burkhard Beins begins “Nadir” with several minutes of pure brushed cymbals and gongs, a standard enough gambit but one which, when played with as much sensitively as is heard here, can generate wave upon wave of luscious overtones and deep resonances in which you feel you can wallow forever. Beins, though, quickly pulls the carpet out from under you about a third of the way through, thrusting you into a large, relatively empty space occupied only by a thin high tone and a handful of random clatters. As abrupt as it is, there’s an invigorating feel to the transition, as if you’ve been shoved from a warm, humid room into a spare, chilly one. After several minutes, you are evicted from the abode entirely, tossed into a back alley where rainwater falls from overhead gutters and the hum of an unseen highway vaguely fills the background, punctuated by the odd bell tone. “Nadir” is a lovely, unsettling performance.
Tony Buck’s powerful “Honey/Tongues” also begins with pulsating gong work, but swiftly moves into a rich welter of stroked and pummeled percussion that mutates in an almost liquid fashion throughout the piece. A section toward the middle contains more overt stick playing than one might expect but Buck, by manipulating the timbre of the struck items and generating a woody, semi-tonal quality, maintains a level of interest above and apart from the rhythms employed. Still, the general surging character of “Honey/Tongues” is never far away, a strong ebb and flow, push and pull, that carries the piece forward with irresistible conviction. It eventually billows outward, scraped gongs emitting near-elephantine roars, pounded metal erupting and dissipating into the air.
And then to something completely different, “Electric Bongo Bongo” by Melbourne-based Steve Heather. It begins enticingly enough with subtle scratchings and crumplings, only to suddenly veer into a protracted rhythm, fairly regular and mechanical, that, while presumably derived from any number of homemade, “junkyard” percussion instruments, doesn’t have enough inherent depth to sustain much interest. Heather elaborates on it a bit and sends the rhythm through some series of variations but, for this listener, few of the beats were sufficiently intriguing to want to hear for more than a few moments. Though Heather provides all manner of varied, even baroque, ornamentation, the basic unconvincing framework of the piece shows through. When the stolid, rock-like burps reappear, there’s a sense of falling back on easy answers instead of taking conceptual risks.
Of the four musicians presented here, only Eric Schaefer offers more than one track, though his three pieces (two of them further subdivided into sections) blend together pretty seamlessly. There’s something oddly retro about his work. Using a fairly straightforward, though very delicate approach, he’s somewhat reminiscent of the British free percussion school of the late 60s and early 70s, though perhaps with a bit more rhythmic emphasis. One can almost imagine some of these tracks having been performed by, say, Jamie Muir around 1972. Maybe even Jon Christenson on a good day. He introduces what I take to be an electrified zither on “No brain, no pain”, accompanied by some rote drumming, but the result is a bit too much like a Han Bennink outtake for my taste. The three sections of “Don’t tell Morton” revert to the soft use of bells, chimes and other “small” metal objects, all rather attractive in a way, but all also verging on the insubstantial (thought he very last section generates some mystery). Not bad, but not memorable either.
“Berlin Drums” remains very much worth purchasing for the Beins and Buck sets (not to mention the continuing gorgeous and unique packaging!). While survey compilations will almost necessarily vary in quality, I’d love to hear just a bit more consistency in this series, the next of which will be “London Strings”.
~ Brian Olewnick
Posted by on June 26, 2004 12:34 PMBrian--that seems spot-on--if anything you're slightly too kind to the Schaefer. Actually I think Berlin Reeds was pretty consistently excellent across all four selections, but the other two in the series are more erratic, especially the new one.
Posted by: nd at June 26, 2004 7:35 PMYes, I do think the well's beginning to dry up a little.. maybe Absinth's Marcus Liebig will find some richer pickings in London (and maybe who knows, Paris).
Posted by: dan warburton at June 27, 2004 8:13 AMI must say that i haven't heard this third offering from Absinth, but i did the previous two. And if i put them in some bigger perspective i don't find any lack of consistency. If you put yr focus on one scene there is always a lack of consistency- that's just the part of it that makes it exciting and colourful. And with a scene as diverse as current scene in Berlin you get in trouble even easier. Just look at recent offerings that are rather in two quite opossite sides of sound spectrum- hardcore ''reduced'' aesthetics of ''electro-acoustic dialectics (wow must have been reading a lot of Karl & Friedrich this days)'' to ''pop songs with a little non conformist twist in them''. LABOR CD compilation on Charhizma is a proof of that; the sum of activites of Axel Dörner (he can be viewed as a link between the young and old ''FMP'' school), Christof Kurzmann again a score in this direction, not to mention Margaret Kammerer's cd again on Charhizma. So there is no consistency in the scene itself (they re luckily for me at least not so orthodox and hermetically closed) and i think the absinth releases are revealing that (and hell one Michael Renkel and Olaf Rupp have been around for ages compared to some younger ones ...). I would dare to say that this lack of consistency is rather a quality in itself (wheather they do appeal the one's critic ear is not important). If mr. Liebig will find some richer pickings in London, let's say around the circles of Freedom Of The City fest crew, than we'll have consistency. At what cost shall i ask?
Posted by: lukaz at June 27, 2004 9:00 AMwelcome luka!
i heard your working on your final exams? best of luck for that...
I think Lukaz makes a very good point: if the goal of a comp like this is to capture some facet of a geographically specific scene, wouldn't it be more of a *fault* if the label only cherry picked the best of the best? This is not to say that Liebig deliberately chose pieces that are of less merit (which isn't something I could say anyways, 'coz I haven't heard the comp), but that instead of choosing pieces which are of a similar quality (in both senses of the word), he chose pieces that reflected different approaches. Comps like this are one of the few places in where breadth is preferrable to depth, in that they offer more of a picture of what's happening in a certain place, at a certain time.
One interesting feature of compilations is how they draw lines across certain scenes/communitites, and show how different approaches can have remarkably similar ends. I'm thinking here of the *outstanding* Xing-Wu compilation (http://www.yat.ch/xingwu/), which helps to bring into persepective the relatedness Eric La Casa, Toshimaru Nakamura, Loren Chasse, Axel Doerner, Mnortham, and a number of really talented Malaysian musicians otherwise unknown to me.
I know that there's a lot of this sort of thing in punk rock, there's some really famous comp of SoCal punk whose name I am forgetting, and of course No New York. Anyone have examples of other comps that have this summarazing character?
Posted by: Nirav Soni at June 27, 2004 11:17 AMI note that the champions of the set so far have come entirely from those who haven't heard it.
Posted by: nd at June 27, 2004 12:47 PM"I note that the champions of the set so far have come entirely from those who haven't heard it."
soundclips can be found here:
http://www.absinthrecords.com/seiten/003.htm
Posted by: non ame at June 27, 2004 2:09 PMI should hasten to add that I have nothing whatsoever against "survey" style compilations which, much like a large-scale music festival, have as one of their salient features a likely variance in quality (at least, as it would appear to a given listener) which one recognizes going in. But I never quite had that sense from the Absinth releases (ie, "This represents a non-judgmental view of the contemporary Berlin scene involving this sort of instrument.") and, in any case, as a reviewer I'd still call each contribution as I heard it. I should further add that I'm quite happy to have each of the three releases so far whatever my misgivings about this or that performance and look forward to "London Strings".
Posted by: Brian at June 27, 2004 4:02 PMLuka makes some good points there, and Nirav too - thank you for mentioning Xing Wu too. I think it's one of the more effective compilations of recent months (and please believe me that's not got nothing to do with the fact that I'm on it.. in fact I'm not very fond of my contribution). Why dontcha review it for Bags Nirav & make those boys from Indonesia very happy?
MALAYSIA, sorry. (Jesus, Dan..)
Posted by: dan warburton at June 27, 2004 10:36 PMAbout compils,
Just come to my mind these two ones on 23five label: 33RPM (french musicians) and Variable resistance (Australia). There is a japanese one too, but I didn't hear it.
Nirav mentioned the relatedness of Eric La Casa, Toshimaru Nakamura, Loren Chasse, Axel Doerner, Mnortham and the Malaysian musicians on the Xing-Wu compilation. I'd very much like to hear more about what these various folks have in common musically.
Posted by: Arnold Lane at June 28, 2004 5:19 AM"Anyone have examples of other comps that have this summarazing character?"
The Texas hardcore punk LP Cottage Cheese from the Lips of Death comes to mind...
Posted by: Steve at June 28, 2004 1:28 PMGaaoooon you're making that up! No album could possibly have such a great title! Who's on it? When? Label? We want info! I'm going shopping!
Posted by: dan warburton at June 28, 2004 9:39 PMDan, it was a 1983 compilation issued by the Austin-based Ward 9 label, and featured unreleased but representative material by most of the really important Texas hardcore bands of the day: Butthole Surfers (whose Gibby Haynes designed the deliriously primitive cover art; sadly, I couldn't find a scan anywhere online), DRI, Really Red, the Dicks, Not for Sale, Big Boys, Marching Plague, Stickmen with Rayguns, the Hugh Beaumont Experience — even the nascent thrash-metal band Watchtower. Long out of print, though I've read that there was a CD issue in 2001. Mental, crucial, ya, you bet.
Posted by: Steve at June 29, 2004 11:28 AMWhat Dicks song is on it?
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