Weird Specialist
Much of what I've heard before from Straschill has been free-form music, and while this album was described to me as being improvised, the emphasis is clearly on creating songs, of a sort. Other than the lulling opener, a strong, even driving pulse always eventually shows its teeth, beneath the disturbing synth and guitar and all kinds of fat bass that could place this collection in the trip-hop/IDM genre. I'm guessing that's where it was intended to be, though it'd hardly be a conventional member.
It's a very quiet and brooding start, in "Errico's Grave". It's texturally thick and nontonal, but the underlying pad (vocals, perhaps?) is constant and it comes across as a pleasing drone with some far-flung explorations atop. It's actually a great setup for the second tune, which is wholly groovacious, complete with opening "hoo!". It's funky without being annoyingly so, even the genre-standard Hammond is free of cliche and the emphasis is the muscular low end which feels friggin' great. Halfway through it takes a serious and surprising detour for the dark side, and really becomes a separate tune, but a pulse reemerges and could go on forever, for all I care.
By this point I'd noticed, in addition to some serious love for a rich, deep, no-doubt-about-it bass, how much emphasis there is on percussion in this music. Straschill has a real talent for drum programming, with layered and unusual grooves that draw upon a nice variety of tones, including a lot of Latin sounds in a wholly different context. After a moody and reticent start, track 3 ("Weird Specialist Part I") gives a distant shout to vintage Santana in its second half, but the scintillating keys and otherworldly vocal pad immediately made me think that if there were a new Matrix movie, this would be a great tune for the end credits. Machinelike, menacing, and unstoppable.
"The Streets" begins as a naked guitar melody which wouldn't be at all out of place on a Radiohead or Interpol record. It's leisurely and quite lovely for the first few minutes, then it starts to turns back on itself, a few atonal drippings float by, drums and Hammond enter and we have another heavy groove that Massive Attack would be proud to throw its patois over.
"I Left My Pants in San Francisco" is the most striking break in the beats. Though the bass and percussion are still present at the sidelines, commenting and questioning, abstract keyboard and guitar noises are given freaky free rein for fully six and a half minutes before a suavely funky pattern emerges, nearly hip-hop with its horror-movie high synth and insistent electronic 2 and 4. Toward the end, most surprisingly, enter some TRULY EVIL German-as-Martian vocals, pitch-shifted into hyperspace and making my hair stand on end with its squalorous declarations. Quite a track.
I'm told that the two separate entities of the "Weird Specialist" title track were cobbled together from ten different recordings. Listening to "Part 1", I'd never have guessed its disparate origins, but "Part 2" definitely does have a bit of a psychotic feel to it, with epic guitar giving way to unhinged keys wobbling around the bad-tempered rhythm, which stumbles out to a drunken, unnerving mechanical pattern. After this, though, comes a gentle yet uneasy denouement that ever-so-gradually ushers in the final black of this most strange movie before the lights come up.
I happen to enjoy downtempo electronica (including the dark ambient sub-genre, which is probably the most relevant here) as well as nontonal improvisation, and I have to say I've never found the two mixing as they do in this recording. Even beyond the unusual combination of styles, there is an uncommon approach to arranging, as evidenced by some of the extremely long introductions before a beat is introduced, or the complete switch to a different feel halfway through a tune, which happens several times. The idiosyncrasy is part of its charm, yet there is also the very immediate pleasure of the rocking groove, ensconced as it may be in a fever dream of discordance. Recommended.
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Rainer Straschill website