Marsen Jules / Deaf Centre

Marsen Jules has been pumping out ambient music for a while now without me having paid much notice, but his new album Nostalgia is a beauty. Even better though is his contribution to Pop Ambient 2010, 'The Sound of One Lip Kissing'. It's the opening track, and traditionally I'd skip it in favour of the wispier, less abrupt music that follows, but that was a mistake. When I finally listened closely and got past those initial shuddering tones, it slowly envelops you in a hushed, gentle rocking motion, like a rocked cradle. It's the storm before the calm, of sorts, the opening assault disarming you for the subsequent lull.



'Once in a Moment' from Pop Ambient 2011 works similarly, but lacks that subtle violence:



I'm not sure how Jules constructs his tracks, but there appears to be classical instrumentation in there, strings at least, but they're obscured beneath layers of glistening processing. In Nostalgia they're often more foregrounded, as in the cellos in the titles track:



... and 'Kundera's Dream':


Here he's close to the deep strings of Deaf Centre, particularly their Pale Ravine in which strings joined gloomy Badalementi synths, the lot doused in reverb:



Their recent Owl Splinters eschews much (but not all) of the processing in favour of simple patterns and acoustic purity, and while I find this approach less convincing their arrangements do reach a state of droning beauty generally absent from the work of most pseudo-classical 'home listening' composers.

Rytis Mazulis: Musica Falsa

Just as my displeasure with the music world was reaching a peak - MP3 exhaustion and related quandaries - as articulated by mnmlssgs here, the new(ish) Mazulis recording arrived in my letterbox!

Beyond the music, which is startlingly original, confusing, strange, thrilling, and annoying, this release as product is professional and convincing. We're given detailed biographies of both artists and passionate accounts by both composer and performer of their excitement in one another's work. Flautist Manuel Zurria became obsessed with Mazulis' music, contacted him, they exchanged many emails, Zurria worked on the project (transcribing and recording all works live), before finally meeting Mazulis in person. Mazulis was awed by Zurria's technique, and amazed at his realisation of his music. This artistic satisfaction and pride comes across in these notes, and in the smiling portrait of the two artists.

In addition, there's a faintly cosmic vibe to some of the notes, 'recorded at night, on Pleanet Earth', making the whole thing warmer and more approachable. The music is formidable, but rich with meaning and sufficient hooks to penetrate.

More later...

New Agenda

This blog now has a narrower focus, and will look only at music, listening, and music related issues. Literature can now be found at Paper and Card. I realise this sounds like a crappy stationary chain, but I've put too much into it already and now I'm stuck with it.

As for Epherema, I guess its goodbye to Webster and them smoking chimps.

Limits

We all know the displeasure and cynicism that comes from having access to everything all the time, the ennui and jadedness, the burnout from digital music overload. I often try and burn FLAC files to CD, nerdily making compilations, somehow trying to recapture the thrill of earlier music times. It always fails.

Surely this is partly because the CD is dead, an ugly, plastic, jagged thing too easily replicated to possess any intrinsic value. My CDs were stored in cardboard long boxes, artifacts from CD store days, stacked on top of one another in the corner of the living room, the corners covered in dust and cobwebs, difficult to find anything, harder to take out, and too numerous - and unappealing - to choose from. Sunday evening I selected a random bundle and stored them conveniently in a cupboard near the stereo, hauled the rest to the shed, and feel a whole lot better.

As a further tool to aid more concentrated listening and appreciation of music we decided to enforce some restrictions: vinyl only, 14 LPs a week (or until we grow properly exhausted) (I still listen to the ipod to and from work). So far it's been great. Here's what we chose for week one:

Waylon Jennings: I've Always Been Crazy

Waylon always sounds the same, which is alright by me. This was good.

Astrid Gilberto: The Astrid Gilberto Album

I know this album intimately, as I do the image on the cover, which I fell in love with when 20 years old.

Bartok: String Quartets 3 and 4

The cover I have is betetr than this, but couldnt find it on the interweb. More dissonant than I recalled, and for our conservative daily tastes, but the famous pizzicato movement is wonderful.

Brahms: Clarinet and Horn Trios

Various: The Bristol Sessions

Yet to hear but missus found annoying, even in small doses. She used to love this stuff!

Coleman Hawkins: At Ease With Coleman Hawkins

We listen to this often already, easy indeed.

Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye: Diana and Marvin

John Field: Nocturnes

Not the edition pictured, ours is by Veronica McSweeney on a weird Irish label Ceirnin somethingorother.

Julius Steinhoff: Where the Wild Things Are

Attempt to squeeze deep house into my partner's listening. Figured this ought to go down better than most.

Lyle Lovett: Pontiac

A side ok, B side less so. The most memorable first song "If I Had A Boat", the hhit I guess, is about riding a pony on a boat, with the line "Just me upon my pony, upon my boat" in the chorus.


Michael Hurley: Armchair Boogie

An old favourite.

Oneohtrix Point Never: Returnal

Strauss: Four Last Songs

Found an A5 lyric sheet inside, which revealed the last songs to have been mostly penned by Herman Hesse. Everyone probably knew that, but I didn't.

Still a few days to go before we refresh but already we're finding the practice of listening to music much more pleasurable. My partner is even more disenchanted by CDs and digital music and even wants to start buying records again! My craving for the new remains, but I'm more interested in buying vinyl too. Looking forward to the weekly chanegover, which alone brings freshness to a potentially stale collection.

Hauntological House, from Sturm to Stott

In using the dreaded 'H' clarifier I'm not about to dive into an analysis of whether the following fit the hauntological bill, I'll leave that to the English critics, but I do want to point to a clear trait that's been appearing in strains of dance music over the past few years. Much of this isn't at all new anymore, just that with Andy Stott's Passed Me By it seems we have a new critically acclaimed release to assess within this vague realm. I'd also like to draw attention to some earlier forbears that seem to have been overlooked.

Stott's new album is marked by a gravelly rawness, a reliance on basic rhythmic details covered in cobwebs and rust, each beat fighting to quantise through the murk. In this struggle they sometimes miss, and we get a slightly broken kind of house, slipping, like much recent UK bass music, between regimented thud and skipping dubstep. These are both areas Stott's explored in earlier projects.



There's hints of the dub techno of yore, but its been rubbed out, leaving bits, traces and smears. Through this vocals may appear, as in 'New Ground', spectral R&B gasps lifted from Burial's songbook. Otherwise it's the creaked hinge rhythms of Actress that dominate, further degraded and given less urgency, more resignation.



It's difficult what to make of this retreat from tonal and structural clarity, aside from the obvious - a disenchantment with the tradition, methods and effects of dance music orthodoxy. As genre boundaries disintegrate altogether, what purpose, aside from retro revival of past styles (a la today's Chicago house), is there in furthering existing avenues? Furthermore, the bleakness present in the music of all these artists - Stott, Actress, Burial, etc. - appears to be declaring a dead-end, reversing - off-road - out of the creative cul-de-sac, then amplifying all the dings and bruises incurred while thundering through the scrub.



With this comes a confusion over contemporary music's place in music history, part of a widespread contemporary confusion with history fullstop, as Simon Reynolds argues below:

Under the Analogue regime, time was tilted forward. In Digiculture, time is lateral, recursive, spongiform, riddled with wormholes. It is characterised by operations like cut and paste, simultaneity (keeping open multiple windows), rewind/fast-forward/pause using mouse and cursor, saving things ‘for later’, fitting cultural or news experiences into your schedule (I won’t watch that major Obama speech as it happens because I can always catch it later on YouTube).

Stott's album in particular seems excavated from the ruins, literally pulled from cracks in the earth, or as FACT puts it: "haggard and caked in petrified dirt: everything here sounds broken, sawed-off, obfuscated, even Hellish". This grit, crackle and obfuscation then functions, obliquely and largely unintentionally, as a kind of carbon dating, signifying contemporary status much like the glitch did in the late nineties. This resigned end-of-history approach is limiting, pessimistic and cynical, however alluring it is in the short term. I do feel there's something more to Stott's album, but the continued use of such processes, particularly as they become mere aesthetic markers, as perhaps Burial is guilty of, is problematic.



Interesting note on this from Nina Power reviewing The Caretaker's new album:

...The Caretaker walks a fine line between resurrecting the past as it was and imposing contemporary ideas of what it should sound like. It’s not entirely clear how effective the scratches on ballroom records are as a means of exploring this temporal slide. It’d be more interesting, perhaps, to clean up old tracks, removing rather than multiplying their scratches, to restore them to the way they might have been originally heard in all their clarity, rather than digitally replicating the experience of listening to 78s as something ragged and barely present.

This is a situation Actress appears wary of, given the direction of his latest release 'Gershwin'/'Harrier Attk':


Pole's Stefan Betke invited similar criticism for his Yellow 3 album, since which he's seemed lost, not releasing anything of comparable worth. In one sense the clicks and pops that marked that trilogy seem a stepping stone to current hauntoligical concerns, but given Pole's immersion in technology, both literally - his trademark sound the result of a faulty Waldorf Pole filter - and conceptually, it embodied all that glitch represented.





Now glitch's insecurity with technology and fearful embrace of its faults have been replaced with a brash confidence in (ab)using it to its utmost, and a desire from producers like Stott and Actress to explore the grittiest depths of what it can do. Where glitch nervously worshiped technology, today's producers lord over it, commanding it to do their bidding, then concealing its hand in the process. The self-consciousness of glitch has gone. The work of Stott and co. might possess a rough, handmade sound, but this has come about through the intricate and skilful handling of technological tools.



Music from a similar period and conceptual agenda to that of Pole but far closer in spirit to current music branded hauntological and/or hypnagogic is that of Sturm, a side project of Cologne techno producer Reinhard Voigt. I always viewed Sturm as Reinhard's version of brother Wolfgang's Gas, yet where Gas is all amorphous clouds Sturm is granular corporeality.





R Voigt's techno productions hardly inspire confidence in the producer's breadth of musical understanding (see singletted air-punching above), given their no-nonsense lumpen sound (done very well admittedly), but Sturm really is worth hearing. The first self-titled album featured a stippled, deconstructed image of Scritti Polliti on the cover, and the music was similarly bitcrunched and scattered - listen alongside Passed Me By in particular and the similarities become clear.

With Sturm Voigt fucked with myriad unrecogniseable samples, or rather anonymous pieces of audio salvage, until rotten, digital backwash, corralling this into vaguely structured 4/4 arrangements. Like Pole, the focus is on digital audio technology, but here the process is less obvious, and the results more open to interpretation. There's a greater wooziness, an intentional lack of clarity, that distinguishes this from the glitch mainstream and its magnification of neat razor cuts, a fuzziness that links it closer to today's artists.

Voigt's second Sturm album Sturmgesten keeps the wooziness but strips it right back until there's nothing but fogged out drums and bass pulses, and very little of those. I got the vinyl and never worked out the proper speed they always sounded better 33. See for yourself below.

Nothing on youtube but listen here:

Sturm: Sturm

And as they're completely unavailable (and I don't think many got them first time round) download both albums here:

Sturm (1999) & Sturmgesten (2000) (Mille Plateaux)

Seth Horvitz

I recently received an album by Seth Horvitz in the post, Eight Studies for Automatic Piano, which is, as the title implies, eight studies for automatic piano. I recognized Horvitz's name, but it took me a while to place it - the man behind pioneering glitch and microhouse project Sutekh.

Sutekh was always about more than house, his filigree (algo)rhythms ideally suited to the conceptual playground of Mille Plateaux and Force Inc, but he was best suited to working in 4/4. He was relatively prolific in 1998-2000, when I first got into electronic music, and I picked up a stack of his 12"s from shops all over Tokyo.

His sound seemed to strike a chord with Japan at the time, certainly with me and my then-new surrounds; I felt it perfectly represented the fast-paced neon-drenched environment of the megalopolis, all sharp angles, clockwork regimentation and complex sound design.



I saw Sutekh live in 2001 in Tokyo at Club Asia, and it was an interesting set, more suited to stationary head-nodding than dancing, but that's no complaint. Far more stripped down and earnest than was usually played in Tokyo, even by with-it hipsters. Highlight was 'Untitled #3' from his Force Inc LP Periods Make Sense, a superlative example of raw, chilly microhouse, its influence audible in contemporary productions by DJ Koze, Matthew Dear's False and countless Minus cookie-cutouts, and the Giegling roster.



Now's as good a chance as any to link to this incredible live set by Kettenkarussell. I've listened to this often, and it proved a particularly stirring soundtrack to a long drive down snow covered mountains in rural Victoria. Get it from mnmlssgs here:

Back to Horvitz, it's interesting to hear him doing new stuff, especially for computer-generated piano - a favoured medium of mine. He joins Wolfgang Voigt in the pantheon of techno - computer-piano producers, and sits alongside such heavyweights as Conlon Nancarrow and Rytis Mazulis. It's not Horvitz's first foray into the 'classical' realm, last year's On Bach by Sutekh took that crown, but this hems more closely to classical instrumentation than did that digital Wendy Carlos update.

First listen revealed a simplicity and minimalism not present in any of the works by those composers listed above. As the title implies, each track explores a specific idea, Horvitz keeping these particularly narrow. Info on each track and the score can be found at the Line Imprint here.

More on this once I've given it a proper hearing...

Dolly Parton

The inimitable Dolly Parton is coming to Melbourne in November, and I'm going.

I don't have anything to say about her, her looks and demeanor negate all analysis and criticism. Better to just bask in her glory...

Dolly's first appearance on the Porter Wagoner Show, 1967, with 'Dumb Blonde':


Joshua from 1971, also on Porter. I've always chuckled at the image of the oafish title character, alone in the woods, blushing before Dolly's charms:


Same date, 'There's something fishy goin' on, on those fishing trips you're goin' on':


Jolene, from 1974. Country Disco:


Title track from the new album Backwoods Barbie:


Collaborations:
Who wouldn't want to work with Dolly?



Truly haunting, 'The Party':


I'm the 9,525,473rd person to view this video.


Tammy may edge out Dolly in my book. Dolly's not collaborated with KLF... yet.


Tammy's beau George:


Linda and Emmylou, 'The Sweetes':


Hulk Hogan:


Polly Darton on Sesame Street:


I could go on...

Harry Matthews: Cigarettes

Not sure how the title fits in but this book was as smooth and refreshing as a packet of Laramies. Weirdly pitched between realist melodrama, postmodern sexuality deconstruction and (subtle) Oulipo construct, Matthews ingeniously ties these ideas together such that they're less independent strands than a well-stirred stew, a multi-voiced multi-layered narrative of love, loss, art and aging in America. Dedicated to Matthews' mate Georges Perec, Cigarettes contains something of Perec's desire for structural logic, not that I'm sure how it works. I never grasped what Perec was doing with Life: A User's Manual though, but enjoyed the knowledge that something overarching was at work. That same sense is present here. Here, each chapter explores a different pair of individuals, the narrative developing as these characters interact, with one another, in the art - and horse - world, and across time. The cast is incestuous, and piecing together the historical web of relationships, and following their implications, is where much of the pleasure lies.

This structure allows for a complete flattening of hierarchy, with no character or narrative element allowed to dominate. Rather, the drama is less concerned with individual character development (although this does occur within individual chapters) than with overall relationships, the picture rather than the puzzle pieces. This isn't entirely true, as those chapters involving the extreme sexual antics of Lewis and Morris naturally stand out, yet by the final pages they too have been subsumed within the larger whole. I read an old Collier edition with the eighties graphics (see top) which seeped into my reception of the book, not the less leading current Dalkey Archive version (below). I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Mathews was once assumed to be a CIA agent in Paris, due to his 'man-of-leisure' lifestyle. This swanning about Parisian high society itself attracted the attention of the CIA and was documented in Mathews' pseudo memoir My Life As CIA. He studied music at Harvard but no idea what, or whether, he composed.

I just finished Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, a hilarious study in uniquely Japanese misanthropy, which I'll comment on, and quote, soon.

Recent Listening

Given my inability to keep this section regularly updated the vague 'recent' ought to do. This is what's been spinning, in no particular order:

The Caretaker: An Empty Bliss Beyond This World
This arrived in the post yesterday and while not as immediately swoon-inducing as Persistent Repetition of Phrases Kirby here is more challenging with regard to structure. The material itself is less overtly processed, but the arrangements are: short loops cycle blankly, then shift slightly to reveal more, or less, of themselves. Pieces end abruptly, and it's difficult to determine when one track ends and another begins. Very interesting.



DJ Rashad: 'Itz Not Rite'
Finally listened to Chicago juke via Planet Mu's Bangs & Works compilation and was very surprised. Expected it to be all jackhammer pummel and lightning fast low-fi jitters but there's real engagement and patience at work. This is the highlight, tipped by David Toop in The Wire. I'm sure it gets more violent than this, but I want to hear that too.



Moritz von Oswald Trio: Horizontal Structures
Nice to hear more voices in the mix, Tikiman's guitar particularly, and while the link to Miles circa Silent Way is made more clear it could benefit from greater pacing, more dynamics. As it is it's rather flat. Bought on vinyl too.



The Wire's Below The Radar 6
Usually miss these but glad I didn't with this, there's a lot of interesting music here. The following three in particular:
Borngraber & Struver: 'Dancing Queen'
Great slow-mo, low-slung, heavy house chug. Not much happens but so effective, remaining engaging throughout its long duration.



Mark Fell: 'Manitutshu 1.3'
I loved Mark Fell's Multistability of last year, for all its difficulty, but this is better: incredible sound design, but set to simple, effective arrangements. Tones like updated 303 blips, pulsing to disordered algorithmic functions.
Mark Bradley: 'Spiraling'
Know nothing about Mark Bradley but this is ace, doing what the title says in a Mego way, related to the Mark Fell but more painful in parts, more hectic, and less clinical.

Mokira: Time Axis Manipulation
Great beatless drifting dub shimmer. FloatingHead speaks more eloquently about it here.



Velvet Hands: Daily Session Mix 5/17
Find it hard to commit to mixes and podcasts with the deluge out there, usually need some kind of personal introduction, vouch of quality or somesuch. This set by an old chum for Brooklyn radio is worth sticking with: slow deep thud through to brash nineties house. Get it here.

Ryan Elliot: LWE Podcast 82
Decent streamlined techno from Detroit. Saw him at Sonar in 2007 and he was wonderful; this isn't as good, for obvious reasons, but still worth a listen. get it here.

Dean Martin: Italian Love Songs

Made pizza on Saturday and Dino is my favourite cooking music, heck, some of my favourite music fullstop. Not usually about offering downloads but he's dead and these labels aren't worth troubling yourself over, so do yourself a favour and get the album, in FLAC here:

Dean Martin: Italian Love Songs

Gyorgy and Marta Kurtag

Listened to the Kurtags over the weekend, particularly their Bach transcriptions. This is gorgeous:



But they're all wonderful:







On disc they're part of Gyorgy's Jatekok (Games), the ECM recording is the one to get. They can get quite dissonant and harsh, and I recall annoying Barry Humphries aka Dame Edna Everage when playing it in the shop at Harold Moores. Barry was a regular with refined music tastes, particularly turn-of-the-century French music, but he didn't like Kurtag.

A knottier example, 'Perpetuum Mobile':



I missed seeing the Kurtag's perform in London, something I deeply regret. I always viewed the Jatekok as a new way to approach the piano, viewing the instrument as a strange wooden box with white and black 'keys' which depress and make sound, divorced entirely from tradition, but think i'm wrong, given the references to other composers. Here's a homage to Christian Wolff:



In one sense then 'games' is how they're played, especially by the Kurtags' four hands: "Teasing, caressing and attacking the piano, they literally play games."

Or indeed quarreling:



I also listened to Kurtag's Kafka Fragmente, songs comprised of elements from Kafka's diaries accompanied by solo violin. There's a pithiness recalling Webern in the short, sketch-like nature, amplified by the trailing off of violin gestures. Vivid and jagged yet hardly daunting.

Grouper - Re-Assessment

Experienced a musical epiphany over the weekend which has forced me to amend my assessment of Grouper. I now get it. She's fucking great!

I was lazing on the sofa listening to the anodyne plinks of Akira Kosemura's How My Heart Sings and I fell asleep, only to awaken minutes later in that strange fug that comes from dropping off abruptly in the day. This was exacerbated by the foggy haze coming from the speakers, ebbing me into consciousness, feint traces of guitar and spectral voice piercing the smoke. It met this in-between state perfectly and head-on, as though intentionally targeting this headspace. That's where my comparison with shoegaze was incorrect; the signifiers might be similar, but the conception is utterly different - sadder, more personal, resigned, yet more desperate. A nerdy and hackneyed analogy, it reminded me of the way Princess Leia appears to Luke early in Star Wars, a frightened, shimmering image suspended in space, "Help me ObiWan Kenobi, You're my only hope."



This is analogous to how Nick Richardson describes Grouper's latest 2 releases Alien Observer and Dream Loss in the June 2011 issue of The Wire, as being essentially about listening, about the nature of media and reception.

Recently, there has been a proliferation of music about listening. Not the ‘listening as hard as you can’ of the Wandelweiser posse, or the ‘listening to musicians listening as hard as they can to each other’ of group Improv, but individual listening experiences of people with lives, minds, emotions, homes. How often over the last year or so have you read, “It’s like Steely Dan heard on a sun-drenched beach in Hawaii from a hammock as a warm breeze kisses your cheek”? Or, “It’s like an old Stax record playing from someone else’s car in the carpark after prom during your first real smooch”? And it’s not just a writer’s conceit: often musicians will imagine the back story of a projected listener in considerable detail. Tom Krell, aka How To Dress Well, has described his song “Ready For The World” as “what it would be like to be a little boy and to have this downstairs neighbour who’d just gotten broken up with by his boyfriend and you can hear him crying… and you can hear R&B music coming through the floor?” This new music takes a pre-existing musical substrate, bends it, abrades it, dips it in echo, in such a way as to imply, via a strange conflation of subject and object, the psychological/emotional/geographical situation of an imaginary listener.

Richardson goes onto to say it's like listening to Judee Sill playing from the next room, but I'd keep the shoegaze analogy: Slowdive or Lush, the original obfuscation further washed out through obstacles and distance, the voice nothing but gentle, indecipherable murmurs. I also think of unfinished artworks, the grey noisewash like the block of granite in Michelangelo's unfinished sculpture, Liz Harris's the emerging subject. Or the vague hints of landscape appearing through the empty canvas in Cezanne's late works.

It was 'Moon Is Sharp' from AIA: Alien Observer that I awoke to and which made such an immediate impression:



But the following few tracks were equally involving. What's so interesting about Grouper is how each of these pieces is constructed in a similar way but end up sounding so different.



This track even taking its name from one of Shoegaze's most iconic moments:





This is music that does not work through headphones, but requires high volume, speakers, and the space of a room to achieve its aims.

Blame It On The Boogie

Tonight I'm going to a disco at a local bowling alley for my daughter's kindergarten. There she and her chums will be performing Jackson 5's 'Blame it on the Boogie', involving a coordinated dance number. She's been practicing all week, should be rockin'.



Strobe effects on the above video impressively disorienting, but not as weird as this, the video to my favourite Jacksons song 'Can You Feel It'. No idea what the words at the start refer to, or the voiceover, but the image of the towering, godlike Jacksons sprinkling pixie-dust onto the awed populace, walking on water, making rainbows, is thrilling. The tolling bells work a treat too:



Michael Jackson was a regular visitor to my hometown of Perth, Western Australia. His first visit was in 1973 with the Jackson Five, where Michael was lucky enough to bump into renowned commercial radio presenter Gary Shannon, beating Shannon at a game of pool.
"I bumped into Michael in the hallway of 6KY FM. He told me he was a good pool player and challenged me to a game. He beat me."

Gary Shannon:

Gary Shannon was recently sacked from his position as breakfast presenter at 96FM last November. Shannon has no future plans. “I’m sure I’ll pick myself up. I will try to relax and get on with my life."

Michael Jackson's most famous visit to Perth was in 1985, where he was bribed there by Perth millionaire Robert Holmes A Court, who included a trip to Perth and appearance on Telethon as part of the sale of rights to Beatles songs to the pop-loving Jackson. This was an iconic moment in Perth cultural history:





He came back in 1996 as part of his HIStory tour, and stayed at Observation City Resort in Scarborough.



Observation City:

The Perth obsession with Michael Jackson continues, exemplified by these "world-class impersonators" from VIP Entertainment:


Tonight's performers have a lot to live up to.

The Devil Speaks...

Straight after my Broker / Dealer appreciation post Kompakt announced a reissue of 'Dig Deep', on their Immer imprint. Thought it was called 'Boots and Pants'? It is on discogs. If 'Dig Deep' is 'Boots and Pants' then what is the other track called? Fuck, I don't know, anyways, well worth picking up, it's a doozy.

Speaking of Kompakt I shopped there recently, unable to resist this, Wolfgang Voigt's latest project Kafkatrax. The whole concept is alluring, particularly the image of Voigt as Kafka.

Comes with limited edition print by Voigt, perhaps a reference to Prague Castle? Somewhat disappointing in actuality.

It sounds as expected, woozy voices swimming around Voigt's trademark raw drums. Nothing surprising then, but still more adventurousness than 99% of humdrum functional techno. And I like that cheeky image...