Hamburg multi-instrumentalist Sven Kacirek performs all music on Scarlet Pitch Dreams, his third album, weaving complex percussive compositions from tapped glass, wood, piano, drums and sundry resonant objects. There’s also bowed objects, aqueous plinks and, occasionally, bursts of white noise. Jana Plewa’s vocals and acoustic bass from Johannes Huth and John Eckhardt also feature. Not surprisingly, Scarlet Pitch Dreams frequently overflows with activity, at times thrilling and dizzyingly inventive, irritatingly dense and dreary at others.
The skewed marimba lines, beaten tin and resonant pipes of ‘This Album Is Not’s are a promising start, and the bowed metal, tuned woodblocks and toy chimes of following “About Me And You’ offer further novelty and kooky melodic hooks. Plewa appears briefly in “It Is Not About Love’, a frenetic piece built from jangled bottle tops and rustled steel, and again in the title track, gasping over a ramshackle 4/4 of bongos, shakers and gloomy buzz. So far so good, but the ideas are stretched over 11 tracks, and it’s difficult to remain engaged in less distinctive pieces like “Possibly You Find Your Own’ or “Narratives Inside The Pieces’. Still, be selective and there’ plenty to enjoy here, somewhere between Brandt Bauer Fricke, Pierre Bastien and Queensland’ Clocked Out.
Joshua Meggitt
