Burkhard Stangl/Dieb13 - eh (Erstwhile)

There are moments in life when what was once familiar can appear startlingly strange. Perhaps it is the way the light falls on an ordinary object, casting its features in a dense curtain of shadow that obscures its ordinary dimensions and reveals an aspect utterly foreign to the eye. The same holds true for words: there are moments when a word, taken for granted after being written, spoken, or heard thousands of times in the course of a life can inexplicably look like an awkward assemblage of letters that have no internal logic, but are rather the bearers of a foreign dialect long buried by centuries of neglect. In my experience, these moments of discovery can be quite unsettling, as if the familiar ground under one’s feet has been rolled away, exposing a heretofore hidden terrain that was also always underfoot but never before examined or appreciated. Certainly, there is a loss of comfort that attends this fracturing of what was once familiar, but such experiences are also a window to a kind of beauty that has the ability to astonish.

This is the effect that this record has on me whenever I listen to it. Like the names of the ten track titles, each recombining two letters into patterns both recognizable and oddly disconcerting (some of them look less like expressions or proto-words than exhalations of breath that have never been codified into language), the music on this disc takes familiar elements and recasts them into forms that are all at once strange, haunting, and beautiful. The first track, ‘eeeh’, is an excellent illustration of the power of this music. Fragments of melodies that sound as if they must have come from some song we’ve heard before waft through the air, at times contrasting, at times merging with, the familiar rhythm and texture of the needle spinning on a turntable, or the submerged singing of a century-old recording projected through an old gramophone. One of the hidden gems of the Erstwhile catalog, ‘eh’ is an important musical document, combining and recombining old idioms into new patterns, new languages.

David Jones