Conrad Schnitzler and Pyrolator – Con-struct

Bureau B

This is part of a continuing series of works that delve in the Conrad Schnitzler sound archive to generate newly inspired works. As the label stresses, this series isn’t intended to be homage or to be taken as a plain remix project, but more as an active experiment in creativity itself.

Con-struct starts sedately enough in a drift of aerosol(ed) bleeds over a plasticity of hiccups and gaseous exchanges in  Vangelis-like yawns in a streamer-filled horizon. An opener that leaves you head scratching as the next taster “228-1” (all the tracks have archive catalogue numbers) holds an altogether precarious stability. This is more like it — a dub cage erosive full of tactile scatterings, ruffled aluminium and croaking vocal toads, lovely immersive shapes that climb round your head with a slippery focus strung along a pulsing agitation.

And from here it flies…

Regal keystrokes and pebbling cravats follow on “289-5”, bringing to mind Gold and Silver’s pleasing contours worked over in dynamic cross-cuts and bubbling undercuts. The odd pond skating skim-riding some lovely murmuring mirages and Indian-esque ripples. Yeah, I’m liking this. It’s more tuneful than I had at first anticipated (I was expecting more ricochet in the dynamics — the music is using Schnitzler’s archive as a springboard after all) but this isn’t a bad thing, especially if (like here) it doesn’t dwell in that half-arsed button-pushing soup a lot of electronics often swim.

As an album it definitely offers up plenty of really good mechanics, conjures a weird sense of two soundworlds thrown into some pumping echo of danceability. A mutated technoid (for the most part) mousetrapping Rot‘s kinetics. An illicit taste of fibrous thumps and kettling gasps, as another contingent pulls unpredictably at the rhythmics, tangles up intentions.

If this was a homage to the granddaddy of sequential candy it would be doing an excellent job, but it feels more than that. Conrad Schnitzler may have left the building, but he’s still very much throwing the spanners here, forcing the possibilities, dancing dreams that the Pyrolator (AKA Kurt Dahlke) is adding new flesh to. Sometimes it feels like Conrad has been smoothed away to only a glimpse. In fact on first listen you might get the impression this is very much Pyrolator’s show, but on subsequent listens you can pick up on the pulsing thread that buckles this beast. The ghost in the machine that seems to be directing things from the great beyond, as if Kurt had to Con-ply to Con-Struct.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-