Stahlwerk 9 — RetroMekanik
Though quite loud, with respect to pacing, this music only crawls, menacing yet monotonous and without urgency, dwelling on a single drone for the duration of each song. This album and many others in the 'martial' genre could be said to have been made from a detached historian's perspective, merely conjuring indistinctly the fading indistinct phantasms of the original frenzied events of war long after the danger, the imperative to act, was long since passed. As such we fall into Stahlwerk 9's individual imaginative, aesthetic and speculative dream of war, interwoven with archival relics of the genuine article. This disconnect between the truth of war and this music, which attempts to examine it, could easily have been a serious annoyance, as it is in the case of so many under researched, formulaic movies and bands that unknowingly make ridiculous mockery of war. Luckily, Hopfe has a knack for using samples to dredge reluctant, rare and long deceased spirits out of stagnant pools known only to the scholar, to ghastly and entrancing effect.
Opener "Warsaw Calling / Als Ich Starb" is notable for its clever use of whimpering / crying sounds to create deep unease. "Konzept Stadtguerilla" is the most violent track on the album, sounding like a relentless air raid siren sounding out in a clamour of twisting and ripping sheet metal.
Much of the crunching harshness falls away after the 3rd track or so, atmospheric subtleties become more obvious, and I find it easy to slip deeper in. "Pe Culmile Disperarii" is tense pad synths, feedback loops and a limply mumbling chorus of ghosts... The drums beat in the graveyards at night, hint that what may have initially appeared to a placid, unchanging surface could rather be lying still in wait - a sniper observing a single position from afar for many long hours. But a sudden flash of action never comes, and the cannon fire remains audible only in granulated, roughly preserved form, separated from its original by great uncrossable gulfs of temporal distance.
In much the same manner as artists like Blood Axis or Boyd Rice, Hopfe also examines war directly through philosophical and existentential monologue on spoken word tracks like "Overture to A War". Like the awkward and dogmatic personalities before him, he speaks in a stilted, oratorical tone. He makes no real memorable points, but stops short of embarrassing himself. The real interesting thing here is that the noise is made to be more subdued so that we might hear the words, and for all the rigid, martial feel of the rest of the album, tracks like are significantly similar to the moonlit seances of Endvra, Halo Manash or TenHornedBeast, unabashedly applying heady, mystic organ tones which glide smoothly through the sound space.
As a whole, "Retromekanik" is an unsurprising but pleasantly immersive document of the martial drone/noise genre, which includes many solid tracks and no real weak points. I'd whole heartedly recommend it to any fans of this sort of thing. If you're not familiar with this kind of music, I'd say check out some Blood Axis first.