This release is for those (like me) who enjoy their ambience closer to psychedelic-doom-trash than metal-punk-orgasm, if you will: perpetual disintegration. I'm a lazy man: keep the terrain changing so I don't have to change it myself, please. An undifferentiated wall of hiss is just NOT the point, in my opinion. Power Electronics can do that all it likes, there's only so far that the reduction of complexity can take you. Almost everything in this world is more than the sum of its parts, so why say that endless repeats of Second Annual Report done less imaginatively don't provide diminishing returns? Of course, the messenger is always more readily perceived than the message, so in many cases those diminishing returns become necessary. Look at any "major musical event" (whatever THAT might mean) from the last 100 years--someone's still trying to make that revelant, to re-live that importance in the first-person. Whether it's swing, rockabilly, or Nirvana, most creators of music start out believing that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, when it fact it's the laziest. If it isn't completely obvious to everyone already, I'll state my feelings: influence, NOT imitation, is the most polite, inteulligent, and above all interesting way to show kudos. Learning that your favorite band loves the new Hot Chip album usually means that they're going to be skewing their next album towards some vein of lush electro-glitch-core (e.g. David Byrne talking about Jamees Blake in his semi-recent interviews). However, when someone(s) can talk knowledgably about music they love that has had no impact on the music they make, it is usually an indication of egolessness.
I would rather see a million inept attempts to reach something new and wholly original than a dozen well-crafted refinements of existing principles. Even the most experimental genres, labels, composers, etc. have throwbacks--that's not the problem. I suppose what I'm ultimately trying to get at here is the idea that people's needs have changed, so now music must be a throwback in order for most listeners to hear it as more than DATA. This is something we all deal with on a daily level, to the extent that consciousness becomes the dividing factor. What makes our ears stand up has always determined to which ideas we are receptive, which usually keeps our interaction with art to a superficial minimum. "Give me content I'm sure to enjoy, and the form does not matter," is generally what the masses demand--despite the commercial assumption that form dictates content (i.e. radio), which has proven to be correct only to a very limited degree.
I'm no different from these nameless listeners I describe, which is why Nicht really hits the spot. Or a spot, I can't really say I know which one it hits. It comes in the trappings of darkness, more an alliance with industrial noise than ambient drone, but sonically it's really in the middle. The darkness comes mostly from the vocal element, not the instrumentation--although there is an undercurrent of anxiety that would make this hard to term ambient. Calm anxiety? Sort of, more like that feeling when you know something inevitable is forthcoming, but you've accepted your own relation to the event, and the time to bide until it comes. Most of the value inherent in this music (at least to me) is it's ability to depict or reflect conflict without any coloration. I mean, isn't it time for music to make more than just declaritive statements of intent? I don't know about anyone else, but I spend the majority of my time too confused to know exactly WHAT I'm thinking or feeling, I just know that not having a dependable moral or emotional compass is generally upsetting. And since doubt does not exactly inspire ecstacy, it seems that modern life steps further away from that door every day. Ignorance may have used to equal bliss, but these days it just means you're clueless.
The age of the composer, of the singer-songwriter, has not passed, but it is passing.
Movies vs. paintings/photos=current digitization of music past commodity vs. previous humanism. Current music amounts to the closest humans can interact with technology (unless it's busking on street corners, in which case it's generally lame), expectations have risen accordingly. Presently music is more an expression of technical competency in expressing relatable emotion, than any sort of emotional depth in and of itself. Throwing out frames of reference for "sad" or "angry" rather than expressing those feelings in a way that better underlines their complexities. The problem at the heart of the issue is that people are rarely creative out of a pure inner need--that need becomes tainted by ideas of fame or acceptance, and so rather than expressing any true feeling and taking a RISK of being misunderstood, it's far more rewarding to use preexisting modes of communication, even if they are very limited.
I know nothing about Peterlicker, so none of this necessarily applies, I had to get up on my soapbox. Every little bit of info about these guys (and there doesn't seem to be much) puts their aesthetic as some sort of ultimate doom-laden apocalypse refinement. And maybe this says more about my imagination than my musical tastes, but this sounds to me like much more than an apocalypse. It sounds like galactic expansion and contraction. Suns burn out, only to have space evaporate and compact itself. The floor is thirty feet below your dangling legs, then you are swimming in it like molasses, up to your elbows. It's big, but not to the point of insubstantiality, right? Because sometimes something can be so big that it just becomes another microcosm--just so much wasted effort. Compare early Tangerine Dream to 80s movie-soundtrack Tangerine Dream, for example. There's a comfortable size to the five tracks on this album, like being stranded in a station after the last train has left for the night, knowing that you didn't really want to go anywhere anyway. Rather than the typical musical journey, this album provides a large space to explore at the listener's leisure. The dubbed-out mix allows maximum space for sound to play, and meaning isn't imposed.
................Creeping, zittering synths and slurrrrrrred vocals, pitch-shifting, sounds of abrasion. Processing on top of processing. So many shades of grey that it becomes technicolor. No shattering of senses, this melts and melds--not destruction, but creation through deformity..............................
.................Moments of shimmering ambience, creaking, yattering, rumbling, crashing, background detritus so overwhelmed by sound that its origin becomes unimportant, just another set of elements within the scintillating psychedelic wash......................
Notes shouldn't be clean, like the rest of music. Mixed Fidelity infects everything we now listen to, from the dirty/sparkly accessible pop on the radio to the most experimental. Why would a note start or end the same way each time? Why does a riff bear repeating? These are not questions anyone should be interested in answering definitively, they continue to inform every piece of music. Notes should slide, collide, become dissonant and assonant, yet for some reason cleanliness is prized. Thankfully not here. The listener is thrown down a dark tunnel, with few textural reference points, only a sense of gravity. The gravity provides the grace. It may seem directionless, but only when atomized. If taken as a whole, there is more than enough differentiation to allow for gleanings beyond the initial. They removed the repetition so you could replace it, through repeated listens during which you don't need to pay attention anyway. If you already know what's there, then why confirm it through acknowledgment? The only end result that matters is gained understanding, revelatory or otherwise. Art that hits the pleasure center without informing is the worst sort of friend, and this cautions like little else. It is a WARNING, here to keep you away from anything of less value.
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