rlw — Fall Seliger Geister
translations of 'Fall Seliger Geister' or its individual track titles, there is a strong sense of the spirit world breaking through into our quotidian realm right across the release.
The album's 42 minutes is filled with elusive sound sources, all seemingly designed to generally give us the willies, and occasionally terrorise or traumatise through fear of the unknown. There's a lot of creaking, giving the impression that your room is somehow trying to resist intrusions from ainvisible presence. There's even more groaning, possibly the product of a slowed down tuba, that describes a restless soul trapped between worlds. And there's needling electronics, often sine-like feedback or theremin-ish, that suddenly slices through the darkness or floats portentously in the air. This is paranormal audio activity at its finest.
And yet several subsequent listens start to reveal other, perhaps more musical, qualities that although firmly experimental seem to have an internal logic of their own that is rich, lively and rare. So it's no surprise that 'rlw' is the work of the German concrète / electronic composer Ralf Wehowsky. With roots as founding member of post-punk innovators P16.D4 and co-curator of the Selektion label with Achim Wollscheid, Wehowsky has been composing and producing resolutely non-idiomatic soundcraft since the seventies. His work is neither academic nor street, instead being an original, idiosyncratic approach wholly his own.
For 'Fall Seliger Geister' (which translates as something along the lines of 'Case of Blessed Spirits'), Wehowsky has built what seems like an alternative orchestra with which to explore haunted interiors. 'Aus dem Irgendwo' ('From Somewhere') finds what sounds like piano strings scraped slowly while an eerie creaking creates a gnawing rhythm to describe the pipes of an antiquated heating system springing to life. Later, the aforementioned deep tuba sound fills 'Aus dem Nirgendwo' ('From Nowhere') with its incessant groaning of despair accompanied by wraith-like slices of manipulated tape that cut through the traumatic atmosphere. A softer, but no less eerie, combination of chimes and the crumbling textures of a slowly spinning aural scree thread through 'Ein Gespenst geht um' ('A Spectre is Haunting') to delerious effect. While the album's highlight, 'Albert's Geister' ('Albert's Ghost'), surprises with loud and chopped joujouka horns-like passages played on an unstable tape recorder - presumably a reference to free jazz legend Albert Ayler.
So, despite initially seeming like an intimidating, occasionally cacophonous experimental cinematic soundtrack, 'Fall Seliger Geister's expertly pooled sounds are so vivid and balanced, often moving gracefully around the stereo image, to become a fascinating and dramatically rewarding meditation on ghostliness.