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John Campbell - Howlin' Mercy
From his early work with the pioneering Krautrock band Cluster to his later, more ambient solo recordings, Hans Joachim Roedelius remained one of the most innovative and prolific voices in contemporary electronic music. Born in Berlin in 1934, he drifted through a series of odd jobs before turning to music, later collaborating with conceptual artist Conrad Schnitzler in a series of experimental bands including Plus/Minus, Noises and the Human Being. In 1968, Roedelius and Schnitzler were among the co-founders of the Zodiak Free Arts Lab, a group of avant-garde artists from a variety of creative disciplines which quickly became one of the driving forces of the Berlin underground scene; with Dieter Moebius, they formed Kluster in 1969, performing extended improvisational live dates throughout West Germany...His minimalist electronic work with Cluster and Harmonia was neatly, if unfairly, labelled as 'ambient' until the final years of the last century. But thankfully, his clear influence on pioneering electronic artists like Aphex Twin has helped to expose the eerie, evocative power of his work and rescue it from the indignity of comparisons to The Orb, chill-out compilations or tapes of whalesong from the Indian Ocean...Inlandish teams the 73-year-old Roedelius up with Tim Story, an American neoclassical electronic composer and enthusiastic fan twenty years his junior. In his 1970s outings Roedelius played Eno to the Roxy of his collaborators, pulling their conventional rhythms off-centre by adding drones and found noises to the mix (ungenerous listeners might even have compared Cluster's more experimental albums to the sound of a malfunctioning hoover or coffee percolator).This time round though Roedelius plays the straight man, and returns to his classical roots by anchoring each of the twelve tracks here with simple, delicate and repetitive piano motifs. It's up to the younger man to subvert things by applying subtle layers of electronic weirdness: clicks, beeps, rattles, and warm, fuzzy drones.http://www.musicomh.com/albums/hans-joachim-roedelius_0108.htm
he title of the first cut, "Feel It," conjures visions of summertime tech-house jimmy jams, but in the place of flip-flops you instead get a space helmet. One could consider it a tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey: HAL 9000 provides the lyrics ("My mind is going… I can feel it") over what one assumes to be the looped breathing of the astronaut Dave Bowman. The rolled toms and muted guitar strums rounding out the track show off Tejada's trademark of mixing organic and synthetic elements.Two melodic highlights on Where occur back-to-back in the form of "Raindrops" and "Turning Point." "Raindrops" features a layered staccato harmony of electric piano and bass notes riding over a bed of synthetic rain drops drenched in slap back delay. There's not much else to it besides a dissonant-and-yet-hopeful melody and the usual clever edits, but the end product has enough hook and shine to it to make it memorable. "Turning Point" continues the minor/major key feel but features a remarkable digital bass line as the centerpiece, surrounded by washes of pad swells. The short breakdown featured here should be used as a reference in breakdowns 101—it's a useful, appropriate transition that shows just enough leg before getting back to business...http://www.residentadvisor.net/review-view.aspx?id=5401
