Klangwart – Transit

Staubgold

Not so much glitching as rippling on a bed of deftly, deliberately placed samples organised by Timo Reuber and Staubgold label head Markus Detmer, Transit is also blessed with the production skills of Joseph Suchy, ensuring that everything unfolds with a suitably spacious, widescreen feel.

A constant sense of motion, of change and unfolding, of new vistas opening up as the album progresses, matches its title perfectly as the music moves across the stereo spectrum with occasionally delicate surefootedness. Transit demonstrates that computer music can sparkle with a human warmth, even if it has been built up in stages by a duo who describe themselves as technicians or “sound station attendants” who inject sequences of organised sound, rather than composers. This very Kraftwerkian attittude is belied by the results, and while no track clocks in longer than five minutes, the whole flows and writhes with a sensibility that bears little relationship to the poppy tendencies of the godparents of technopop, even if the occasional heavily-filtered ravetastic and/or groovesome rhythms heave into view from time to time.

At times, Transit condenses into a clattery melange of rhythm and sounds layered into a sometimes queasy morass of sliding timbres and deracinated synthetic beats and melodies; at others, the music is almost beatifically pleasant, causing an electronic film of shifting sensations to glide and flow from speaker to speaker. Hissing, swirling reverberations, ghostly Thereminics, flickering chimes, burbling bleeps and infrequent processed vocal snippets surround motive forces which could equally become at once danceable and/or kosmische, should the appropriate mood strike. Klangwart are never content to let a sound rest or repeat for long, save in conjunction with another taking a complimentary route alongside, lending the whole the atmosphere of a psychic travelogue into both the outer cosmos and along a winding, shining path through inner space.

-Antron S Meister-