NEUBAU
– rymdmyr
(digital,
nonine)
Now that summer is in full effect it is time again for
a little electronic clickery and wizardry. Especially the kind that is
soothing and refreshing, with its subtle, sub-line bass sounds and ambient
keyboards that always sound like underwater travelling. A cooling
experience, much welcome in these days of 33 degrees celsius in the city and
no cooling off until late at night.
For Nonine recordings and the artist Neubau such an
approach is too superficial and too short-sighted. The genre of electronic
clickery is superficial and short-sighted, no doubt about it, so to approach
the music with questions like “is it relaxing?” or even “does it do
something to calm me down?” is not only pragmatic but necessary. Anyway,
Neubau aka Arno Steinacher has something deeper and more profound in focus.
The tracks are regularly spreading away from the cool and relaxed area to
more structural and complex ideas, both in structure and sounds. Like moving
away from the pool area of your holiday resort, where all the well dressed,
well tanned and well groomed people are, to the backroom seminary and
workshop facilities, where people are actually working their brains, instead
of having them baked by the sun.
This means effectually that the droning of Neubau is
regularly interspersed with sounds of unclear origin and effect, with real
instruments and all sorts of microscopic additions that are hard to make out
while you are dozing in the sun to your ipod, but have a strong effect.
Little bleeps or beeps that only come up once or twice in a track, different
variations of crackles and the dynamic opposition of layers that make the
tracks sound like a post-postmodern version of Knitting Factory jazz. There
is a distinct interest for the human voice used as one of these variation
themes, especially distorted human voices or the clatter of human voices.
There already have been a lot of words on the speciality of the human voice
as opposed to all other means of meaningful sound production and even if
Steinacher uses these samples as just another source of sound and mixes them
into the track on a same level basis, they nevertheless don’t lose their
signifying manner.
There is probably a lot of mathematics in these tracks,
or Steinacher was going through a difficult phase in his life, when he wrote
the songs on this album. “rymdymr” as a nonsense / dada album title
hints at an affiliation with the track-title-machine that Aphex Twin built
for himself which then accidentally started to make music as well. In
comparison to that allfather of electronic music, “rymdymr” sounds a lot
more relaxed, diverse and less looking for extremism – and probably
thereby much more intriguing. This makes the tracks wander into strange
territories sometimes, from sinewy to soundtrack. Remarkably, the only track
with something close to a percussive or rhythmical element is the title
track and there it only takes a few moments of beats and mutates into a
glacial synthie wall quite quickly. When it returns it has changed into an
echoy, nightmarish replica of a beat, almost like an evil twin of itself
that has rotated through the mirror and then collapsed on itself. But that
is gone just as quickly.
Other than that “rymdmyr” is mostly all layers and
movements, drones and sounds, instrumental and structural and has a lot of
depth in each and every moment. So you might relax by the pool to this album
as you may sit up and listen. At the end there is a remix of the title track
by mee rabenstein added to the album, who is the runner and mastermind of
nonine records to make this a neat package. And maybe to soothe of the
effects of the last track by Neubau “nysnoerya”, which based on the
sound of feet walking through rubble stones is the harshest and most
structural on here. Whereas the remix dives into soothing sounds from the
beginning
