Kammerflimmer Kollektief – Désarroi

Staubgold

Kammerflimmer Kollektief - DésarroiThis creaks and groans at you in satisfying amounts. The double bass player pushing against the instrument’s confines in fricative flurries, like somebody scrambling over the tuneful core whilst struggling with an Ikea self-build. Detailed acoustics eating at that see-sawing harmonium, a Klezmer colour sway agitated by electronic mites or a sudden rush of guitar. A vibe that dissolves, tourniquets some tasty twilights. Apertures that sink into a horizon of notching machinery, steadily expanding into some rich sleazy juju. A lovely concoction of oblique guitar, sliding cello and regular mid-tempo drums bounding into an uncertainty of creaky floorboards and twisting willow.

It’s brilliantly realised stuff, with “Free Form Freak-Out” clawing an altogether darker hue which reminds me of the unnerving ambients of Throbbing Gristle’s Third Mind, but with more scenic contrast. Harbouring some lovely chaotic colour, full of rickety-legged drunkards and zitherfesting eels. A dissidence jazz that holds light for blissful songform that is “Evol” (mirror-written “Love”). A real game-shifter in breathy female vocals supplied by Heike Aumüller. “The more you love. The more you can love”, she repeats in tender tones that are over-run in electronics, vocals and musical backing curving in ultra-radiate, highly contemporary shivers of pure brilliance.

“Burned” is more shaman-whirred, a zephyr-jewelled gem of vague jazz wurm waggling into new tuneful shapes with muted film narration clinging on beneath as percussive claps and rebounds shift, divert, suck you into its microcosmic universe. “Unlösbar” continues the magic in saxophonic moonshine, before throwing an up-tempo fork into the mix, full of bent chords and crumbling intents, percussive reverses and explosive shapes wound into a wormhole, with “Saumselig” (“Dilatory”) a Lynchian-like conversation of tremolo(ing) tones and whirring rubs.

A cool cover version of S.Y.P.H’s “Zurück zum Beton” follows on the scattering wake of roosting bats, Aumüller returning to close the album, her mellow-worded flow accompanied by jazzy double bass flickers and the sequinned light of Moroccan finger plates. A spinning mirror-ball that transports the punkiness of the original into a smoky late-night Weimar basement.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-

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