The "Re:" "regarding" in the work's title is important: These are not remixes but rather compositions that suggest and converse with ECM's history.
Villalobos and Loderbauer make no attempt to tie the works to beat-driven techno. The catalog is a quarry of sounds from which the duo extract loops and beats that range from ornament to animal. It's not necessary to be intimately familiar with ECM's catalog to enjoy Re: ECM your reviewer is not ; suffice to say that the label has housed most permutations of jazz and improvisational music since its inception in the late s.
Jazz and electronic music make natural partners; it's a pairing that many have explored previously, from Moodymann's dusty Black Mahogani releases to Four Tet's work with drummer Steve Reid. Both styles fascinate themselves with sustained textures and place a premium on sublimating the artist to the form both also lack rock music's obscene physicality, which has allowed jazz musicians and electronic producers to stay creative late into their careers.
Villalobos and Loderbauer don't seem interested in jazz's harmonic infrastructure so much as the vast array of tones used to produce it. Hissing hi-hats, voluminous stand-up bass, and damp woodwinds are placed decoratively next to one another. If I'm feeling cynical I start to think of Re: ECM as aural feng shui, its 2xCD, two-hour structure better suited for inattentive mood-setting than true exploration.
But there's nothing easy or simple here; the artists' restraint provides plenty of airy space, but between that air are sounds that are almost uniformly rich and complex.
It feels minimal but unbalanced. If Re: ECM were to soundtrack a dinner party, it would have to be of the newfangled, slightly sadistic variety in which the chefs have lots of tattoos and serve mostly foie gras and bone marrow. Re: ECM stands out not just for its depth but for its variety, for the sheer number of musics it incorporates.
Jazz is the primary focus-- it has been for the label-- but the duo also touches on tribal blues "Reannounce" , choral "Rekondakion" , Eastern drone "Requote" , and lounge "Recat". If Villalobos has ported over one element from his techno work, it's an uncanny ability to fashion rhythms that are both crisp and deep; the sounds here will buzz and twitch with his unmistakable style, but they'll do so less predictably.
Re: ECM. Many centuries later saw the introduction of European closed-eye listening practices, blindfolding audiences to ensure a musical experience devoid of visual bias or distraction. Now the ears wore the blindfold. According to Schaeffer, imaginary sounds are ontologically distinct from the objects that produce them. They begin with an effect and work back to cause.
The acousmatic experience, then, fundamentally separates sound from source. This equation is never foolproof. Once the sound in question has been activated it takes on a familiarity of its own. Where Schaeffer perhaps shortchanged his own convictions was in never turning the mirror around, for the mise-en-abyme of his sonic philosophy indicates not only an external distinction, but also an internal one—namely, that in their solicitation found sounds morph into experiences in and of themselves.
The severance is a divided cell, an audible illusion whereby infinity speaks. Another possibility: that, even in the intimate knowledge of a source, the acousmatic experience may thrive. Acousmaticity depends on spacing of source, case, and effect; on reversibility between inner and outer.
At its heart is an aporia. It can never be more than an interpretive effect of the listener. In such a context, our instinct pushes us toward treating sound as material, especially when we can hold recorded art in our hands and manipulate its realization at will. The moment we press PLAY, two temporal realities—that of the recording and that of the listening—share a space.
Time collapses. Without access to individual tracks, the Berlin-based DJs looked to separable bits for sampling, and to the gaps therein. In so doing, they went beyond effect to aftereffect, charting the ghosts of these pristinely recorded sounds which, no matter how you splice them, betray their source. Yet in the hands of this artful duo, even the obsessive ECM listener points to self will find there is still an enigma to be had. Much of this feeling derives from the fact that Villalobos and Loderbauer took an improvisational approach to layering these loops and elements in the studio.
Their acousmaticity goes from the outside in. Though the genres are not so distant, their approach manifests differently throughout. Looking to the latter first, we find a marked balance of organic and electronic. More than balance, even, is the unity of these two categories—again, not so distant. Pianos unravel chains of icicles, swaying hand in hand with satellite interruptions and wave distortions. Gloopy and viscous, this bubbling drone touches feet to ground, its back to sunset.
Gut strings wince in self-reflective heartbeats as the ghosts of drums flip from open to shut. With its scattered rhythms, rusty veneer, and granola crunch, this track takes due cue from Boards of Canada.
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