Code warrior Uwe Schmidt tests his customarily fragmented language with mobile structures that work in tandem to maintain a unified identity on Liedgut, his first significant statement in some years. The palette of the first few pieces consists of a thousand shades of white noise, which unravel, fray and constantly renew their filaments. Subsequent works then work these atoms into percussive clusters, often underlined by Schmidt’s mannered vocoder vocalizations.
There is an engaging interaction between the bit-blasting and Schmidt’s attentive formal elements. The former is highly precise, impersonal, yet of a certain boldness, while the latter swirls the space something strange, injecting unexpected moods and tensions into these pure, abstract sound-worlds. Sparse, skipping beats are rendered murky on account of the underlying melodic development of “Mittlere Composition No. I”, and, accordingly, the track seems fixed somewhere between the human and inhuman. Differently, the rigid funk found through “Im Rausch Der Gegenwart I” rides on a compressed intensity maintained by the cruel innocence of the steady programming. More impressive still, the minimalist percussive glitch characterizing “Wellen Und Felder” is delightfully animated and carried ever-upward by a feint nursery-rhythm.
Indeed, of the host of pieces presented here, each is intelligently judged and accomplished in its intricate cross-cutting between insistent, cerebral percussion and sentimental synthesizers. Owing to this, the album achieves a strange finesse, adroitness, and tenacity in its constant mutation.
Max Schaefer
