Con-Struct

Album review

Prolific German experimental artist Conrad Schnitzler spent practically his entire life in search of strange sounds. Nearly every day, he captured otherworldly tones and rhythms in his home studio, and he utilized these recordings in his performances in addition to his countless releases. The fourth volume of the Con-Struct series, which features younger artists making new compositions from Schnitzler's vast audio archive, was built by Schneider TM (Dirk Dresselhaus), and as with previous volumes of the series, it is stressed that this isn't a remix album, and that these are new compositions created from the source material. This definitely seems to be the case with this volume, as opposed to the 2015 release by Pyrolator, which emphasized Schnitzler's influence on techno and trance music. Here, Dresselhaus refrains from adding any original content, strictly sticking to the original recordings by Schnitzler, and he processes the sounds in real time, adding effects and manipulating the material as if it were a concert. The album manages to sound as much like a Schnitzler album as it resembles the previous two Schneider TM albums on Bureau B, which found Dresselhaus building audio sculptures from the noises of construction sites and nontraditional guitar sounds. Much of the album's first half features clicking, sputtering rhythms surrounded by jarring noises that fly out like sparks. Some pieces drift far away from conventional rhythms; "Dabb" seems to slowly slosh around in a pit of quicksand rather than move forward. "Parabelflug" is much more evenly paced, but still squishy, and there's a hint of a suspenseful melody lurking behind. The curious, sinister "Inspektion" similarly ambles along to a crushed, detuned drum loop. After that, the album largely detaches from rhythm, ending with the 24-minute "Wurmloch." The slowly swirling piece drifts ever closer to the abyss, periodically flaring up with anguished mechanical screeching. With this album, Dresselhaus seems to be channeling Schnitzler rather than simply revisiting something he left behind.

© Paul Simpson /TiVo