When Hamburg-based Marc Richter isn’t busy with his Black To Comm project he can be found paying homage to sound pioneers and avant-garde artists through his sundry side endeavors, residences, and exhibitions. Sundry feels right when hearing the latest of these experiments cum album, Coh Bâle, which over eighteen sketches, manages to never really coalesce into a fully formed work. And for the record, I don’t think it was ever meant to. Grab bag could fit too: a random collection that only sounds arbitrary because we’re missing the code to decipher it. 

Like any good archive, there is no actual red thread, no connective tissue, other than the impulse to organize around a central body, source, or other classification system. The individual compositions (if that’s the right word here) are loose – intentionally so, I guess – and really have no narrative or unifying arc, remaining quite steadfastly as disparate pieces. 

This all sounds like a fine and dandy meta-archival take on field recording until one actually sits down and pays attention to the results, which are often so scattered that I am tempted to say that many only made sense as pictorial scores or Ableton graphs. As objects to be listened to, there are caught in that most unenviable of places: between ethnography and music. Take the pairing of “Europamusik” and “Scheinwerfen”, which feel closer to the cutting room floor of Kling Klang Studio than a journeyman field recorder’s tapedeck. Or the suite of “Gesänge” that course through the album, which summon the spectre of Stockhausen’s early “Gesang der Jünglinge”, at least to these ears. The pieces are far too abstract to be impressionistic and yet not wild enough to break free from their song-like strictures.

Coh Bâle is a work that fits within the larger genre of field recording and electroacoustic improvisation, specifically that which privileges the sonic archive of foundational gear and their studios from the GRM in Paris to the ZKM in Karlsruhe. In other words, Europa Endlos. To find out more for yourself