Label: Mute Format: CD
Holger Hiller‘s first album in a long time is a self-titled melange of the musical styles he developed in the Eighties and Nineties for Mute, plus a load of new tricks picked up along the way from his time as producer, remixer (including a stormer on Can‘s Sacrilege in association with this album’s producer Christoph Kaiser) and even writer of muscic for adverts in Germany. With such a lot of influences and familiar patterns to draw on, it’s not surprising that Holger Hiller is a bit of a mixed bag, one which sometimes requires a swift press of the rewind button to check out one double-take moment or another.
There’s a touch of Laibach about “Micki Mouse” – but Hiller was often in the same area with his use of orchestral brass samples and big electro drums anyway, and here things get quite demented in places as car-horn riffs compete with the stabbing chords and violin swoops. He’ll start a track in quite silly mood from time to time too, stretching what sound like German TV snippets into ear-bashing sound collages of abstracted echoes on “Pulver” for instance, or making a bleepy rhythm and pitched-up vocals into something much more sinister in “Traüm”. “Toyshopshoptoy” is another peculiarity, as detuned toy samples blend into Japanese speech samples and a regurgitating music-box melody to produce a track which shifts from being quirkily jolly to disturbing with deceptive ease.
It’s when Hiller develops the dance music styles he messed with on the classic As Is album in 1991 that this album really works best though, as heavyweight drum & bass breakbeats mesh with mellow keyboards or ticking loops. His typical use of snatches of vowels and consonants or other wordless vocals works to good post-Industrial, intensely mashed-up effect too. Still, the comparisons to that album and its Demixed follow-up are ones of flavour than of simple progression – eight years on, and things have got even weirder, as “Then I Cut It Up Into Little Dream Units” demonstrates both with its apposite title and the way it will process glitches from abstraction into something resembling a faint rhythm.
There’s a peculiar atmosphere to Holger Hiller, one which is strengthened when a dubby bassline is overlaid with some avant vocalisations and phased clicking loops on “Once I Made A Snowman” for example. Shuffly manoeuvres take the mood from introspective downbeat to the alarming in minutes, and nothing is really ever quite as it seems. This trait is perhaps best demonstrated by the concluding song “L’Amour Fou”, which sounds at first like some kind of smokey neo-jazz smugness, especially with its electric piano mellowness and loping beat. But a listen to Chilo Eribenne‘s lyrics reveals a darker perspective than the apparently smooth melody promises – “I’ don’t care if I never see you again/I swear if I ever see you again I’ll shoot you in the brains” being a particularly scathing couplet. Add in reprocessing tricks from Florian Hecker (who contributes a lot of bizarre little effects throughout the album) to scatter the glossy surface into fractal glitches and a concluding vocal cut-up and it all adds up to Oddness.
-Linus Tossio-
