Asmus Tietchens – In Die Nacht/Litia

Bureau B

Ok, apologies for the absurd delay in this – these two Asmus Tietchens albums were re-issued in November of 2013 and a whole festive period and all the excessive faff that that entails has gone and left me only writing this far too late in the day.

It’s relevant to this review because I tend to prefer giving a record a go in a way that’s looking to listen to it with new ears, and getting words did has been tricky – the records have been sat around, listened to fairly frequently and are about ready to make their final journey to either the “yeah, I’ll listen to that a couple more times” pile or the “… alright, but maybe so-and-so would give it a decent loving home, feed it and make it feel wanted.”

In the vogueish (reprehensible, tiresome, deplorable etc.) fashion of clickbait, you won’t BELIEVE which pile he ends up putting these records in! (tl;dr: It’s the latter, with some apologies).

Before all that though, let’s have a quick word about the sleeve design – you all know this already, but LP sleeves don’t reduce down well to CD size. These do OK, because it’s fundamentally simple and clean design, monochrome with inverted letter space differentiating title from artist, and a clear distinction between colour polarities split down the middle. As far as it goes, it’s close to the sort of very plain but compelling, utilitarian lettering design common to something like architecture journals that didn’t really get into the new wave thing. Exactly the sort of thing that makes you go “Oh, that’s alright – I’d bet these’d look fucking cool if they were a set of LPs.”

In Die Nacht (1982)

Earliest of the two but not earliest of the earliest, and we get some very fulsome stuff. According to some interviews I read, these records (and the two I reviewed previously on Freq) were efforts to put Tietchens on the map – structured pieces at odds with the more concrète heavy stuff of before and after. So there’s a lot of regular, unrelenting pulses and moderate rhythmic diversions but still plenty of grit to the tones and variation to the mixing. Actually, being as he’s from a sort of concrète–brut background, the mixing is very delicate – there are a few mischievious off-square tones bothering the thresholds of consciousness around the mud at the bottom of some mixes which does that wonderful thing of fully drugging apparently clear motifs. Unlike the earlier two albums, there’s a few destabilising effects – opener “Mit Zebras Rennen” opens fairly bouncy-technik but quickly rusts into dilapidated near-ambient.

The earliest of the four re-issues – Biotop – sits fairly firmly in a relatively quantized space. In Die Nacht shows beginnings of fractures in that tendency – “Kopfuber in den Gulli” lurches away from metric spacing with some utterly filthy industrial squelch, “Unter Fliegenden Tassen” does revolting notes splendidly and there’s a sense that these aren’t quite ‘populist’ records but records peck-ripping away the patchwork of pop-ish-ness to reveal carrion flesh distemper. And as with anything on the perimeters of industrialism, there’s the marching number (“Spanische Fliege”) playing terror with looming intervals. It’s a grand record, a load of depth and ideas and Tietchens’ production chops are heavy heavy… but perhaps it’s still too regular to be perennially exciting for me the electro-tourist.

Litia (1983)

According to whatever passes for ‘research’ in my half-baked mewlings, this is the last point Tietchens persisted in more formal music. He’s almost recalcitrant in interviews (on this subject – he’s quite gracious and massively articulate otherwise) but with Litia there’s the sense that he kind of didn’t so much run out of steam with conventionally-formal stuff as he built different engines – as with “Ritual der Kranken Freude,” with its almost piss-takingly over-extended (in gesture, not length) meltdown. Quantization falls out into a space never anything like ‘swing’ but more like slug-batteried metronomes and rhythms rudely shoved off-beat (“Abhuster Nebulizer”). Where previously there was accentuations of codas with something more gestural and textural, there are moments here of deliberate dropping of tonal consistency – “Vorsaison”‘s sudden off-texture glacial swoop, f’rinstance.

Twenty-first century interviews with Tietchens have seen a few mentions of his enjoying hip-hop, and there’s moments on “Pollys Square Dance” [sic] veering into something of an early-90s hip-hop break; or “Torpedo Ahoi”‘s proximity to the something of a Sheep on Drugs/Atari Teenage Riot hi-hat trill. I’m speculating that part of the reason he stopped doing this more regular stuff was that while this is all well-accomplished and picks up a shitload of texture and density, the complexity of the sounds can tend towards being subordinated, buried under the more glaring ‘straight’ narratives – the bass register of “Abhuster Nebulizer” has some criminally revolting sounds that potentially come across less as worthwhile stand-alone textures but surrogate wonky bass. Also probably worth noting that this level of attention to tonal detail wasn’t really ‘the thing’ in electronic music at the time – concrète is certainly an academic pull but beyond that, beat-driven electronic music was starting to look a little flimsy and chintzy, so drawing back into the world of textural disposition might  have looked more attractive.

I mentioned earlier that these have been sitting around for a while, which has made it all a bit trickier – while Tietchens (I’ll repeat) did one of my favourite shows of last year in Brighton for Spirit of Gravity (a second plug, they are amazing), it’s possible that I went all the way through the arc of “listen – pay attention – stick on the in background – pay attention again – take notes – sick on the background – neglect a bit – do I want this or not?” over a few months. Not bad records – no no no – just not keepers. They’re definitely notches in his narrative and, coupled with the live show, interesting enough – but not necessarily keepers.

One thing I was wondering though – there’s bits on these records which get close to being an alternative history of ambient music – “Regenwald” (In Die Nacht) flirts with dog-hassled near-ambience and “Park und Gutter Morgen” (also In Die Nacht) meanders about somewhere between Takehisa Kosugi‘s Catch Wave and Alvin Lucier‘s Music on a Long Thin Wire – which is to say, marshalling tonal quietude and subtle variations into something less sonic exploration and more directed ambience. One of my perennial problems with ambient as a genre is that most of it is utterly shite; a big part of that shitness is down to the dearth of forbears – most folk do Brian Eno badly rather than triangulate ambience with composition and texture. Tietchens is far from being anything like proto-ambient but there’s aspects of this which veer into alternate histories of ambient music – between tonal control and discrete drift.

Though in that there’s the kernel of what might be the reason for my cold feet about committing these to the annals of the regular collection – great records, really, but as it’s currently sitting in a dissatisfying place of “historically interesting but not quite gratifying”, I’ll probably end up passing in the long-term. But YOU, lovely reader – if you’re a proper electro-fetishist then I wish you well and commend these records for your glasses-wearing soul.

-Kev Nickells-