Kammerflimmer Kollektief - Incommunicado
(Temporary Residence)
This summer, the U.S. market was flooded with Kammerflimmer Kollektief CDs. First there was their debut album, with its multiple hit singles, then there was the group's Spanish album, sung all in Spanish for Latina cred, and then there was the group's long lost album of demos, of which they fought hard to halt the release.
Wait, maybe that was Christina Aguilera. The Kammerflimmer Kollektief flooded the market this summer, but I'm pretty sure none of the releases are the result of hangers-on trying to cash in on their sudden fame. Instead, the band's two prior releases were given a U.S. re-release on Temporary Residence, and the band's new album was co-released by The Dylan Group's Bubblecore label. Incommunicado, the band's second album, was actually the last of the three to make it to American shores. So how does it compare?
Incommunicado is a bit different of an album than those other two. Kammerflimmer Kollektief is a merger between the worlds of electronica and jazz, and this album is where that merger is most radically experimented with. The band's other albums find Kollektief leader Thomas Weber creating electronica and post-rock pieces and then (about half of the time) adding a jazz orchestra to them. For half of Incommunicado, Weber challenges his Kollektief to create and reinterpret the beat and noise driven music of the group's Mäander album using only the orchestral instruments.
The first three songs of Incommunicado are the jazz orchestra's reinterpretations of Weber's electronic songs. These songs are colorful, vibrant, and alive. "Nachtwach" is a rumbling of strings and drums that sways and staggers like an angry beast. "Gras" finds the musicians straining and stressing their instruments in a Galbraith-ian way, creating a vast mine field of tiny explosions of screeches and creaks. "Rand" is a short freak-out explosion. As electronic compositions made by Weber, these three songs may have seemed flat and one-dimensional; with the full band recreating them, they are full of color and vitality.
The other three songs on Incommunicado seem to be there just to fill out the album and make it a full length. "Venti Latir" is also a recreation of previous work, this time covering a Robert Wyatt song. The violin is the focus here, using its warmest tones to repeat the same phrase, sounding like a sample, as the other instruments create a debris field of texture. "Kissen" is a single swell of sound, and "Holler" is just a few pieces of string skronk; these two songs end the album with somewhat of a weak point.
If the summer passed by so quickly that you never bothered to listen to any of Kammerflimmer Kollektief's three releases, Incommunicado is likely both the best album to have and the best place to start. On Incommunicado, the experimentation of this collaboration is at its most intense.
|
