ANDEREGG
anomia
CD, apestaartje
One of the most exciting things about electronic music is the search for
“new music behind the frontiers of traditional music”, i.e. tones and
sounds that will be perceived as music even though they are no way near what
we have grown up with. Very much like Twelve-tone-music in the early years
of last century, the interest in ethnical music from the most distanced and
reclusive places of the globe in the rest of the last century, even the big
white-/Japan-noise-hype in the late years of last century, this search is as
much an exploration of the possibilities to produce sounds as an individual
journey into the possibilities to perceive sounds as music. Once you have
overcome the almost fascist brainwash of MOR-radio and the teenage
wastelands of the Top Forty-charts a whole new world opens up for you. But
that is quite obvious, actually.
Brendon Anderegg lists the instruments used on his second album
“Anomia” as follows: “computer, electronics, guitar, rhodes, cello,
accordian (sic!), clarinet, tape loops, small instruments and field
recordings.” I find it very interesting that he brackets so-called-real
instruments, and very traditional almost classical ones actually, in between
the modern instruments of computers and the really old instrument of your
surroundings. (Have you ever pondered the fact that listening is the only
sense that is constantly activated? There is no way to stop hearing things.)
But it is symbolical for his music, which is a far stretch away even from
most of the progressive producers nowadays. His tracks flow steadily but
also evolve in a waving dynamic, so that they start off somewhere and end up
completely elsewhere. “Anomia” is an interestingly silent record. It has
no drumbeats or obvious rhythms, even though a groove might descend from the
waves of sounds that are layered over another. These sounds stem from the
instruments mentioned above, and therefore range from the most beautiful and
soothing strings to harsh crackles and static noises. Anderegg’s tracks
are more complex and concrete than your typical clicks’n’cuts-album,
maybe rooted in an understanding of minimal music or rather like lying down
in a place between the green outskirts of a big town and an industrial site
and closing your eyes, listening to the symphony nature and society make up
for you.
But even though the computer, the noises and the field recordings always
seem to get the upper hand in Anderegg’s music, every description of them
will end up with the word “beautiful” at some point. Maybe you remember
the pictures of the working sawmill and the music at the beginning of every
show of “Twin Peaks” - big saw blades running, wood being destroyed with
high arches of light flowing over the screen and the unforgettable score of
Angelo Badalamenti – and its unification of nature and technology in
beautiful sounds and pictures. For it is true, everything is natural,
because humankind evolved from nature, every resource is taken from this
globe and the separation between nature and society is a purely sophistic
task.
