Beatnadel

Album review

AGF's continued work in the realm of viscerally attractive electronic avant-garde pop -- glitch as constant inspiration rather than simply an option -- continues with Beatnadel, the seventh full-length release by the artist otherwise known as Antye Greie. The album's second track, "Beatnadeln," almost serves as a manifesto, reaching from Kurt Schwitters and Laurie Anderson's vocal experiments and testing to a present, laptop-focused sonic form of expression, crackles and clipped beats and voices to the front as deep echo stretches out behind, as on songs like "No Harm." The breathy focus of "Extimicy" plays up the promise of the title, something that revolves around whispered invocations and a seemingly straightforward rhythm -- just -- that dissolves into a quirky break before shifting back to weapons-fire crunches with the impact of the harshest electronic body music. Another highlight, "Rooster Beats," has the same melancholic feeling of late-'90s Panacea, a bit of futuristic retrospection for a time which in turn just anticipated dubstep's initial atmospherics enough. Hearing the apparently straightforward "Restless Heart" is also an exercise in how to treat expectation; if AGF's vocal delivery finds a slow melodic performance that could be transposed to another arrangement fairly easily, the collage of chimes, crackles, and more is something all the more entrancing. Meanwhile, a sample of Noam Chomsky in "Lingu-tik," addressing an admittedly simplified history of Germany as shifting democratic to "the pits of human history" via Nazism over the course of a decade, makes for a seemingly jarring element. As a way to tie in the seemingly private world here with the wider one it evolves in, it's an agreeably sharp touch from AGF all around.

© Ned Raggett /TiVo