BLACK TO COMM – wir können leider nicht etwas mehr zu tun

(2LP, dekorder)

There is no such thing as monotony, at least not in music. If you don’t believe me, get an album by Tony Conrad. Or even better, catch the new album by Black to Comm, the second full length finished by Marc Richter, who also runs Dekorder. It is four vinyl sides and six tracks of glistening, dense yet encompassing and massive drones that stand tall and wide as a building made of bricks. But if you take a closer look, or rather a closer listen, then you’ll find a lot of things warbling and swaying within these sounds. Or is it your perception? As you know, there is no way you can trust your senses. They lie to you every minute. And your brains on top, which are always hiding, ignoring or re-interpreting things. Did you know that everytime you remember something it is not at all like getting something old from a cupboard, but the brain is saving the memory new each time, and each time it adds or substracts a little, depending on how you connotated the memory this time around. If you get old enough you’ll experience more and more the strange situation where two close friends have vastly differing memories of an experience they had together and they will swear by their mother’s graves that they are right. Both of them. But I am digressing. The main point is the multi-layered and ever changing horizon of sounds within the static and massive drones of Black To Comm.

My most impressive experience with a drone was flying on a jet plane for ten hours after sleeping too little because I was on a festival for electronic music. With the sounds of some of the most progressive and weird electronic artists still ringing in my head and the constant, muffled thundering of the mighty machine I was sitting in, I felt as if I was able to hear the humming of the smalles part of the machine or my body. Before falling asleep I wasn’t even sure anymore I’d be able to tell the difference between the two. The tracks on here offer the same quality of density, depth and variety. One note, seperated into several parts and blown up into enormous proportions, added with layers and layers of other sounds in the same note, with some breaks and changes, a chord here or a little line of notes or sounds on other places. If you turn around and around on the same spot like a whirlwind, who is able to tell where you’re gonna end up in?

The new thing about this album by Black To Comm is that these drones are made from “real” instruments, which is interesting because on his first releases Black To Comm was about questioning the notion of the real instrument, by using filters for grafic software to produce sounds or by using old recordings and shellacs. The range of ideas is rather limited in consequence in comparison to “rückwärts backwards”, and by all means “wir können leider nicht …” is a basic drone album. And for a drone album its scope is immense. From a submarine to an ultralight glider, from double gravitation to weightlessness, from walls pressing onto your mind to uplifiting sounds of freedom and liberty. From spooky and eerie darkness to the light and shine of a day at the beach. Destinations chosen by your brain.