Posts Tagged ‘krautrock’

Bader Motor – Drei Drei Drei

Posted: 23 August 2016 in Albums
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Veals & Geeks Records – 017 / Les Disques en Rotin Reunis – LDRR#056– 16th August 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Oh yes. Now this is something. How have I not been listening to these guys for all the years they’ve been in existence? A three-way collision between Arnaud Maguet, Vincent Epplay and Fred Bigot, they promise ‘a majestic blend of Krautrock, Thomas Pynchon, Pataphysics, a rhythm box, abuse and Persephone. On Drei Dre Drei, they deliver all of this and a whole lot more.

‘Prima Belladonna’ raises the curtain with a grand, swirling flourish, a galactically vast slow-turning cyclone of sound. From it emerges the album’s first motoric masterpiece in the form of the relentless thump of ‘Disappear in Amerika’. With a drum machine sound lifted straight outta 1978 and a drawling vocal, it’s like Kraftwerk fronted by Mark E Smith covering Cabaret Voltaire’s ‘Nag Nag Nag’ – only even better and more audacious in its locked-down groove and swirling synth drones. And it gets better still: there’s a Dr Mix and the Remix vibe about the dubby ‘New Diamond day’, as whipcracking synthetic snare drum sounds reverberate in a sea of echo in the company of woozy drones and a slow, swampy, spaced-out bass.

The minimalist robotic groove builds a piston-pumping pace on ‘Je Plaure une Lotte’, the dalek-like vocal bringing another element of dislocation to the already disjointed party. The album’s second extended motoric workout, ‘Bongo Bongo Bongo’ is a magnificent counterpart to ‘Disappear in Amerika’, being another Fallesque behemoth that grinds a more overly electro, bass-led groove for well over eight minutes. A trilling organ pipes around the top end while the vocals, rhythmic and repetitive, blur in a wash of reverb. The effect is hypnotic.

While building on well-established forms, Drei Drei Drei revels in anarchic experimentalism, incorporating cut-up sound collages and pan-cultural infusions throughout, giving it a unique flavour. Balancing weirdness and surreal avant-gardism and a mischievous sense of humour with a keen sense of rhythm and groove, it’s intelligently assembled. But best of all, you can get down to it. CAN you dig it? Neu bet!

Bader Motor - Drei Drei Drei

Güiro Meets Russia – Dystopia

Posted: 13 May 2016 in Albums
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Verlag System – VS011 – 29th April 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

As the title reasonably implies, this is a soundtrack to a bleak landscape. The expansive instrumentals may hint at the potential for travel and movement, but they’re pinned to insistent motoric rhythms. The effect is at once spacious and claustrophobic. The stark synths call to mind New Order’s Movement, but they’re balanced by warmer, fuzzy-edged analogue sounds, which creates a different kind of feel, less morosely bereft and more abstract than figurative in form. Building some dense thrumming throbs and deep grooves, it’s eminently danceable for the most part. That said, there are some deep, sombre pieces which are less percussive: instead, the rhythms emerge from the regular pulsations which form a nebulous sonic body.

Single ‘The Possibility of an Island’, here remixed by GMR and Montxo Burgess is a sedate and rather grand piece, with hints of Visage’s ‘Fade to Grey’. Built around a simple chord sequence and heartbeat bass rhythm, it carries intimations both of 80s vintage and a certain sense futurism. Taking its title (presumably) from Michel Houellebecq’s 2005 science-fiction novel set in a dystopian future bereft of emotion and human contact, it echoes with isolation.

‘Ziggurat’ creates a vast, rippling desert of sound that undulates and pulses toward the whooshing gusts of air that encircle ‘Saturn Radio Waves,’ with fragmentary sounds of human voices drifting in and out.

Thrumming, looping motifs evoke a robotic, dehumanised world of synthesis and desolation. And yet through it all shine bright shafts of light, brave and optimistic, like the rising of a sun over a newly discovered world.

Dystopia

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