Noma — Schloss
If there’s anything of a theme to any of Cromar’s albums or output, it’s up to us listeners to discover it. The titles on Schloss are as enigmatic as ever, including a very poetic Harmony Bleeds Unto Snow and a Dada-esque Bike Film Can Percussion, as well as the flat-out weird 14f13. As consistently, the artwork once more betrays Cromar’s ongoing fascination with what can most befittingly can be described as anatomy – that of humans on the albums previously reviewed, and that of a building on Schloss – that’s right, it’s a bloody floor plan.
Quite in line with the album’s artwork, though, the music here also features a variety of sounds that can mostly be classified a, well, urban, perhaps – Schloss seems pre-occupied with a life metropolitan, mechanic and machinated more than anything. The album is filled to the brim with sounds sourced from Dictaphone recordings capturing such various things as rain, a ventilator and a bike – as frequently as not unrecognizable through odd juxtapositions and the process of amputation the sounds underwent – separated from their city scenes, they become odd, otherworldly, and fascinating.
The resulting sound palette is varied; between the soft, atonal whistle of the ventilator on the three W tracks, and the almost gentle drones on Harmony Bleeds Unto Snow, Cromar neither forgets to make a good ruckus. The Little Red House features a slightly sinister portion of audio seemingly culled from a documentary, which is then buried underneath a heap of audio rubbish, including abrasive screeches and agonizing squeals. The Little White House is, for the most part, almost regular harsh noise fare, of the excellent junk type, I might add, like some lost Hanatarash track, were it not for the creaky male voice filling much of the background with indecipherable speech.
As ever, Cromar puts before us an album that is difficult to pin down, both for its thematic abstractness and its diverse sound. It’s not so much a matter of being able to appreciate harsh noise, drone, musique concrète and pure weirdness all at the same time – in fact, fans of one of the above will invariably find something to their liking amongst the others. However, the odd juxtaposition of recordings seemingly so unrelated is likely to throw some listeners off; there’s little of an apparent red thread to pick up on (despite Cromar’s insistence that Schloss is as close as Noma gets to a “concept” album), and while the compositions are at all times surprisingly listenable, the drastic shifts in styles and moods seem to stem more from indecision than ideas.
Nonetheless, Schloss is extremely listenable, and while it is highly varied, it is much more consistent in quality than Hung By Hair… The Music For, which I reviewed just a few months ago. There’s much less of a hit-and-miss feel to this disc; rather than too often cooking up conceptually interesting pieces with not so interesting results, Cromar instead focuses more intently on the sound and the end product, and it works quite well. There’s no piece here that not accomplished or valid in any way, which, I guess, is the perfect testament to Cromar’s incredible feel for sound.
In the end, Schloss comes across primarily as a fascinating catalog of sonic ideas and sketches that, each of them, have the potential to develop into massive, exhilarating individual works. And while it is thus by no means perfect, it definitely is another excellent entry into the ongoing musical mystery that is Noma. Keep mystifying us, John. Please do.