BLACK TO COMM / AOSUKE - split

(LP, Dekorder)

Avant rock with all its highly interesting brothers and sisters, from that weird new kind of folk music to droning ambient sounds to pure noise freakouts, has – in my opinion – taken the run over from jazz. I mean, that all the exciteness and wildness of jazz that was there until the late Sixties, probably the early Seventies (until Miles Davis recorded “On The Corner” probably), the never ending will to experiment and try out all kinds of new ways and things and music, has gotten lost in jazz and is now taken up by avant rock. And Avant Rock meaning all kinds of music played by musicians not computers, that is not made to dance to, that has no evident structure or at least tries to expand the current definition of what is music and what is not music. Because, in contrast to pure noise (aka Merzbow and such) these bands still see themselves inside the confines of music. They don’t want to form an alternative or opposition, they want to be musicians, but explore the fringes. That is also what jazz musicians tried to do back then, before they became all sucked up in success and lifestyle and the cosy niche they have found in the establishment.

Why do I get to these thoughts listening to the Black To Comm / Aosuke-split on Dekorder? Because this record as well as the other current Dekorder release, an album by Scandinavian drone legend Uton, made me think, no feel that there is a lot of energy and wonders, a lot of discoveries and mysteries to be solved in all kinds of avant rock. These soundscapes and experiments are open to exploration and to the most individual interpretation, but most of all they are blistering with life and energy. They are much more than their parts, which means you cannot dissect them piece by piece to get behind their magic, because they stand on their own in that special texture that they are offered in. That is the kind of magic I am looking for in music, the kind of magic that keeps me interested and thanks to labels like Dekorder I am able to get a dose of this magic energy every now and then.

Now to the music: After a long droning intro an almost random array of bass tones and other noises leads into what is the most organic, the most human release by Black To Comm to date. The first track nevertheless is still a long, multifaceted drone, but after a while that bass tone starts to form a beat and a higher keyboard sound sings a long, one-note melody to it. The other track by Black to Comm starts with the sounds of nightly creatures and a manipulated (oh, the echoes!) voice sample and builds into an exciting piece of music, somewhere between Soft Machine and Meredith Monk. If you ever believe that. The two tracks sit next to each other like day and night, the first one, titled “blizzard angels of the golden stratosphere” (that is like warm milk on the tongue) being quite warm and open and full of sunlight, and the other one dark, titled “Stereo lung flute” (that one leaves a somewhat nasty aftertaste) brooding and dangerous. Marc Richter aka Black To Comm is also the boss of Dekorder and these two tracks are a nice topping to his last double album epic “wir können leider nicht etwas mehr zu tun…”. The enigmatic atmosphere remains, but that special organic feeling, as mentioned, is more to the foreground.

Aosuke is not another Scandinavian weirdo duo working with small, instant made loops that are played live, recorded, manipulated and treated and then re-recorded without overdubs, that Richter met on his latest holiday in Finland or Norway, because Aosuke are from Hamburg as well. Maybe he met them in Scandinavia were both were checking out the newest tape releases by Kuupuu or trying to catch up with the Animal Collectives’ lost early bootleg recordings, who knows. They all seem to own a sense for globetrotting, if possible by all means. Tobert Knopp und Ulf Schütte cloak themselves in their own sense of humor and a musical sensibility that forfeits structure for a more trancendental approach. Croaking, creeking and crashing sounds over re-repeated lines, ever changing like the weather, with surprises here and there and more consistency than you might expect from this akward description. With Aosuke it becomes clear why almost all reviews in this area of music contain the words “freak” or “weird” or inflections thereof over and over again.