Limpe Fuchs ‎- Compilation 1977-2017: Trampelpfadnomainroad

Play Loud!

After last year’s Gestrüpp, this intriguing artist is back with a compilation of teasing flavours. Trampelpfadnomainroad is a collection especially compiled to synchronise with her seventy-fifth birthday and an exhibition of her life’s work at Städtische Galerie Traunstein in September 2017.

Part of the Limpe Fuchs Archive series, it’s a variety pack that drops forty-plus years of sonic exploration into a massive nineteen tracks without touching any of her previously released goods. Limpe Fuchs‘s inquisitive nature is as hungry as ever, gathering like-minded souls around her, mulling around a host of jazz-tinged fallouts, even dispatching a few eerie numbers that are just begging for a little Nurse With Wound attention.

Stark blooms of rolling pebbles and smooth tubular reverbs start the journey. The dry kinetic clamber of tumbling dice rolling against your imagination as the metallic chimes that follow stretch like their distended shadows. Glimpses of the Anima sound world zip in and out like fragments of time caught in a snowglobe, freeform adventures that magnetically pull you along in undulating bubbles of hedonism, twitchy with hints of the ritualistic.

As you can imagine, there’s quite a lot to get to grips with. A lyrical circus interjected with the joy of weaving loose ends, those watery rock-pools full of trumpet-trailing tablas, them darting percussives wobbly with slivers of aluminium jumping through Meredith Monk skipping ropes. A sprinkle of old-fashioned oddness gleaming within, at one point (a track simply entitled “Cloth”) Limpe sounds like she’s wrestling a gigantic manta ray, sellotaping its flapping flesh down, then frantically magic-markering the surrounds in pitch-screeched zeal and vocal yelps.

Some tracks are fleeting, Erik Satie-like schisms licking the brittle, whilst others are lushly corporeal, falling around your head in a curling clairvoyance of colour. The viola colluding with knifed jivers of metal or the breathy exertions of climbing the steps of Cheops pyramid in Giza to perform a blinding Hildegard of Bingen-like vocal inside. The unsettling sonics of “Chaparral + Spot Stop” is another gem, whose echoing inkiness daggers your consciousness in discordant de-tunes and yodelling chasms. There’s even a live track from a recent Café OTO outing (that I unfortunately couldn’t attend) where Evan Parker‘s saxophonics are brilliantly stalked by Fuchs’s bassy after shadows.

Honestly, I’ve had this on devotional re-spin for weeks now, a tantalising glimpse of future riches just itching for release.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-