Anbb — Mimikry
Like the works of many great artists, "Mimikry" is an album not only conceived with patience and meticulous craft but with beginning, middle and end constantly in mind. Dynamic and diverse, it includes every style or genre you could have expected out of Noto and Bargeld, from the protracted, cascading shrieks and quasi-melodic half-whispered soliloquys of the profoundly slow and quiet 10 minute opener, "Fall", to militant, anthemic specimens of industrial-tinged glitch like the revelatory "Ret Marut Handshake", and further beyond into sophisticated, classically inspired orchestral cinemascapes, in which lush arrangements of acoustic instruments intertwine beautiful with colder mechanical drones ("Bernsteinzimmer").
The logical, controlled and schematic groove characteristic of Noto's work and most of the music on the Raster Noton label serves as backbone to a majority of these songs. Noto's satisfyingly thick and exact production brings this album absolute clarity and separation of sounds, heavy kineticism through thick bass, and an almost poppish polish, vibrancy and audibility to Blixa's vocal, which proves to be just the extra layer Noto's music needs to achieve real emotional impact.
Blixa forsakes the reserved, contemplative approach to vocalizing evident in the last few Neubauten albums for a vicious, animated and aggressive style. Unafraid to assume all manner of psychotic, threateningly alien personas, his naturally melodic baritone issues forth hypnotically simple refrains with a nursery rhyme-like cadence only to lure us to the moment when his mask of decency horrifyingly dissolves as he utters nightmarish, hallucinogenically inspired snarls, mumbles and squawks ("I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground"). Metallic, wind-soaked ambient howls underneath the beats describe in acoustic terms this same plane of alarming and hyperreal shamanic esctacy. Blixa has reasserted the edge his work with Einstruzende Neubauten once had, some 15 years hence.
The crab-walking, masked figure on the cover says it all - the profound psychedelia and rampaging nocturnal restlessness hidden under the composed veneer of this album shares its surreal, transcendent character and massive force of will with the reality distorting sound experiments of Coil, and especially Peter Christopherson's subsequent Soisong project with Noto's contemporary Ivan Pavlov of COH. A similar attempt at expanded, melody-infused, more organic glitch music, ANBB even seems to make a deliberate nod to Soisong's exotic synthesized vocals with the vocoded gibberish melodies of "Wust".
The majority of the lyrics are in German, but a few thought-provoking English phrases catch my attention. First of all "Certainly this place was endless / It had TV, heat and water. I arrived with a plastic bag containing my possessions", from "Once Again", another driving track that begins with a distorted beat and repeated chorus before expanding into shimmering intensity with layers of spacious ambience and fierce whispered lyrics from Blixa. In the title track "Mimikry", among the most bizarre compositions on the album, an almost synthetic sounding voice states, "You sit at a table, and all the objects become alive". Meanings are not evident or clear, but easy to postulate and imagine.
"Mimikry" is a unique, intense and otherworldly experience not to be missed by any user of hallucinogens, or fan of armchair electronica, glitch, industrial or pagan ambience. Alva Noto and Blixa Bargeld have achieved a subtle perfection and depth in this album that less seasoned artists would find completely unattainable. Blixa, in particular, channels wild demons unknown even to his younger years without sacrificing the intelligence of his later work. I can't wait to see what this pair will do next!