Asmus Tietchens — Eine Menge Papier

Asmus Tietchens barely needs an introduction, I’d dare say: since the late 70s, this veteran of electronic music has been producing increasingly more experimental and captivating sounds. Starting out with a fairly accessible or at least fairly more traditional sound, encounters and collaborations with personae such as Masami Akita (Merzbow), Steven Stapleton (Nurse With Wound) and Dirk Serries (Fear Falls Burning, Vidna Obmana) saw him drift towards the more sonically abstract and challenging.

Eine Menge Papier, on the German Auf Abwegen label, compiles the 1996 7” Papier Ist Geduldig (released through the Austrian Syntactic label) and material from a planned but unreleased follow-up 7” tentatively titled Ende Der Geduld. As such, it compiles all but two P.I.G. compositions (only P.I.G. 1 and P.I.G. 3 are missing and will, according to the liner notes, forever remain in archive). As the title indicates (to anyone who speaks a word of German), Tietchens used paper only as a sound source for this release, and so reveals himself as a kindred spirit of Nakajima Akifumi (Aube), who has produced scores of albums based on a single sound source (his 1998 release Pages of the Book was also compiled of the sounds of paper – specifically, the Bible, of course).

While the sound source is, exclusively, paper, it’s scarcely recognizable in the wide array of sounds presented here. Soft drones run underneath rustles and scrapes, beeps and clicks float in, and I think I hear a buzz saw, and, barring the knowledge that it’s all paper, it feels exactly like a cold and metallic composition of things stripped of anything organic. This impression sticks, for a large part also because the sound itself seems at all times cold, distant, harsh almost (even if, at no point, Eine Menge Papier is actually harsh); a calculated, almost dispirited registration of the possibility of sound extracted from a single sound source, an experiment for the sake of experiment.

Yet if this sounds like a disadvantage of sorts, as if the cool, emotionless venture that is Eine Menge Papier is little attractive beyond the point of an (academic) interest in the possibility of sound, I must say that it is certainly not the case. The compositions are, in fact, highly intriguing, slightly haunting, visceral and visual. The range of sounds at display, furthermore, is impressive, even if you disregard the whole single sound source concept; the drones and rumbles and squeaks and grit could have come from anything and anywhere, yet their interplay is gorgeous, making the whole thing, in the end, sound pleasantly varied and uniform at the same time.

Despite a confusing mismatch between the track list and the actual tracks on the disc (a different order, it seems, though even then the track times are still several seconds off), Eine Menge Papier is a great disc in every which way. It sounds marvelous, and the packaging (a fan CD in a sleeve that reproduces the 7” art for Papier Ist Geduldig, in turn in an excellently designed outer sleeve) is beautiful as well – and manages to capture the spirit of the disc quite successfully, too; cold and organic at the very same time. Highly recommended, by all means.