From Volume 4's siren-call "signals" now to...noise? Not really, but those expecting the cricket clicks and painterly-daubed pulses of that previous set will find Volume 5 sending temblors across their quakebasket. "Headman" Günter Müller's pared down his players this go-round to a tight and testy four, but what makes this edition significant is the enlisting of well-known electronic instigator Aube (real name: Akifumi Nakajima) to the trio of Müller, Jason Kahn, and Norbert Moslang. Aube's pedigree is well known: a staunch minimalist himself, often building towering edifices of sound based on a single sonic source (water, a incandescent light fixture's hum, the pages of a Bible), across his large discography a number of those recordings have traded longer on sonic theory than resultant execution, but Aube's work rarely fails to raise a tangle of eyebrow or seductively tickle the aural cavity.
In the company of the aforementioned gents here, Aube's prickly environs are more than ably supported. A wholly electronic affair, the four tracks that sprawl across this fifth volume opt to bleed instead of bubble; cracks are made in the surrounding stereo firmament, pulses of irradiated light bursting through. Track one finds Aube's caustic whoops and hollers battering across Moslang's cracked landscapes and the power-surge electric webs spun by Kahn and Müller; brash, bodacious, it's the kind of "noise" within which labyrinths of ideas are revealed that prefer fondling to pummeling. Track two begins quietly enough: soft, insectile trills buttress machine hum, clicks, and end-groove loops, while an electronic sandstorm gathers momentum in the distance, finally erupting in an airburst of squelching tones that melt like liquid mercury. The rising eddies, blips and robotic whistles that sift about the third track could have been lifted from a 60s BBC Radiophonic Workshop recording; placed atop faux, pseudo-"rhythmic" pulses, it's a magnificently tense piece of digital origami that imagines what the Barrons or Delia Derbyshire might have done in the company of 21st century improvisers. On the final piece, the quartet burn coarse atmospheres out of granulated laptop detritus and other mysterious molecular fauna, storming the studio, marshalling their collective talents in the realization of this volume's blitzkrieg bop.
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