Arcane Candy

Cristian Vogel is a composer of electronic music who has been at it since the late 1980s, pumping out a seemingly endless amount of tracks full of avant grade-influenced techno and pop, as well as music for dance, film, sound art and whatever else strikes his fancy. His latest album, the depressingly atmospheric Eselsbrucke, opens with “Invisible Planets,” which borrows a few lines from the movie My Dinner With Andre that describe the pretty good possibility that artificial intelligence / robots will take over the Earth, leaving small pockets of savage humanity cowering in the shadows. After a short while, Vogel spritzes the speech with a blanket of gleaming, pinging electronics until it’s totally obliterated. Eventually, the clouds clear and the talking wins out, as the speaker is caught ordering an espresso at a cafe, which completely deflates the menacing mood established at the beginning. Insert a chuckle here. “Caswels Genius Stack” descends into the hazy house of a homely handmaiden, while “Mount the 137” blows synth bubbles all around your noggin with the help of a lone, muted beat, then treats you to the worst kind of aluminum-drenched hangover that definitely coats, but will never soothe or protect. “Snaker” slithers along, boasting more glimmering, reverb-soaked synth stabs and squeaky percussion knocks. “Ballad” falls further into the handmaiden’s dark boiler room without a flashlight, bumps into walls and knocks over stuff–all with the reverb turned up to 111.

Back up in her apartment, “Commence” commences to stagger around some more in a drunken stupor, tripping over appliances and furniture while looking for the toilet. “Dual” rivals the most uncomfortable hair shirt ever knitted by an old school avant-garde electronic music composer, with its unwieldy collection of staggered reverb squeaks and punches. The similar “Particles” imparts a smattering of electronic drizzle while a soldered robot version of Big Foot does its best to stamp out a forest fire. “55 13 02 09 Stack” buries a muted beat as percolating synth bubbles explode in your face. “Atomic Layers” presents a corroded speech from Karlheinz Stockhausen about how musical sound waves physically change, at an atomic level, the humans who encounter them. The track is finally taken over by–and climaxes with–a discordant, squiggly synth. Indeed, I do believe my own body has suffered a bit of cellular damage after spinning this CD a few times. Such intrusions are par for the course in the global techno dystopia that is unfolding before our very eyes–a scenario that is reflected quite accurately in the sounds of Eselsbrucke.

Label: Sub Rosa Catalog Number: SR375 Format: CD Packaging: Digi-Pak Tracks: 10 Total Time: 41:19 Country: Belgium Released: 2013 More: All Music, Bandcamp, Discogs, Forced Exposure, Last.FM, MySpace, No Future, Resident Advisor

Text ©2013 Arcane Candy

This entry was posted on Friday, September 13th, 2013 at 12:57 am and is filed under Cristian Vogel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.