Andreas Oskar Hirsch — The Salamander Treaty

Most of the album sounds similar to prepared piano: plucked, hammered, metallic impacts with stifled microtonal resonances.  It is actually Hirsch's own self-created instrument, the "Carbophone Jr", which takes the sound of a prepared piano closer to that of an African Mbira or 'thumb piano', and augments it with electronic aspects.  The remainder of the sounds seem to be drones, electronic in origin, or heavily processed, and fill in the backdrop with ghostly ambient fog as they gradually modulate.

 

His style could be described as belonging to that small but vital niche of music that sounds as it were the folk music of a lost civilization, a kind otherworldly post-industrial music, with simple loops and riffs from unfamiliar instruments, with odd harmonic qualities.  It is similar in tone and sound to Zoviet France or Rapoon, but with a vivid modernity to the recording quality, and a colorful variety of synthesis techniques.  At times it's not clear whether I'm listening to a granular processor, a vocoder, a resonator or some combination of all three when hearing drums that seem to pulse with chordal synth tones.  It is possible Hirsch's instruments recalls all 3 of these things without needing any external processing.  It creates remarkably complex, yet lush and tuneful timbres.

 

The compositions themselves are an uneasy mood music, suitable for a film noire or spy film, and sometimes remind me of Trent Reznor's style in his "Ghosts" series, in which each piece would establish an atmosphere through a couple of repeated melodic motifs.  Tom Waits has also historically had a penchant for using atonal percussive arrangements in his music, and got close to this mood with the instrumentals for songs like "And the Earth Died Screaming".  It is as much science fiction as it is something from the ancient past, and is so vividly evocative that it becomes a soundtrack without an actual film required.

 

With its eight short pieces, the album is over in a brief twenty-nine minutes, prompting me to immediately play it again.  It is a masterpiece of tuned percussion and mysterious science fiction atmosphere.  I place it alongside tribal post-industrial greats such as Rapoon's early work or SPK's Zamia Lehmanni, and recognise that Hirsch creates his sound almost completely from scratch, whereas the former tend to base their work on samples.  This is a stunning example of the imaginative potential of 'new school' analogue devices and self-created setups. For more info