Klangwart — Sommer

Timo Reuber, a writer of screen plays for television as well as a solo recording artist for Staubgold, has known the label’s founder, Markus Detmer, for over 18 years, all but four of which have seen them collaborate across occasional recordings and hundreds of live performances as Klangwart. Sommer seeks to celebrate the tenure of their musical relationship by compiling pieces new and old, all thematically underpinned by the light and heat of summer.

The album initially appears to alternate between loose, amorphous sound worlds full of rising and falling psychedelic synth washes and rhythmically propelled tracks whose motorik repetitions immediately refer to Cologne’s Kosmische musical heritage most famously embodied by Can and the early seventies’ productions of Conny Plank for Cluster, Kraftwerk and Neu! amongst many others. Indeed, like many of their Cologne-based contemporaries in electronic music such as Mouse On Mars or Bernd Friedmann, Klangwart have succeeded in continuing this local, creative tradition without being hindered by any revivalist tags. This is partly thanks to the innovations of the original scene whose music imagined a future so effectively that it has since protected itself from seeming too dated, but is also partly due to the way the style lends itself to techno’s modern composition and production techniques of looped, repetitive beats and plug-in modulations.

Wisely, Sommer opens with the infectious rhythm of ‘Hitzefrei’ whose bass pulses repeat like a locked-groove while layers of crystalline synth writhe and unfurl in a way that seems more polished than its improvisational method might otherwise suggest. Later ‘Moloch’ matches ‘Hitzefrei’s drive with a series of deadly, plunging bass notes that combine with synthesised trills, squelches and squawks to sound like a rave as heard from outside the venue where individual sounds are less identifiable than the malevolent, building energy of the whole.

Elsewhere, the rhythms are far more submerged, often seeming like a byproduct of combined tones, as on the closing track ‘Amöbenruh’, taken from a limited release from 1998, that sees the duo stripping their sound right down to a single note formed by a meandering, buzzing tone that stops only to start again over the top of its own reverberating tail. In doing so it creates regular patterns that build to form a revolving cylindrical drone, cleverly panned to change subtly with each movement of your head.

Although not necessarily the most consistently warm of summers - the shimmering electronics often evoke icy crystals as much as they do sunrises - ‘Sommer’ is an ideal introduction to Reuber and Detmer’s cosmic compounds and is suitable for any season.