Ümlaut — Un Étre Humain Ordinaire

[Audiobulb Records — 2024]★★★★★

Reviewed 6 December 2024by Colin Lang

There are some ambient, abstract works of electronic music that are so hermetic – claustrophobic, even – that the worlds they created leave little room for an outside even as their source material depends on it. This is neither good nor bad; it is simply a way of categorizing certain albums as they appear in a landscape populated by a host of other endeavors, be they groups, performances, or listener-driven works. Ümlaut (aka Jeff Düngfelder) is unapologetically hermetic, and his latest release, Un Étre Humain Ordinaire, is a tribute to the expansive and yet cloyingly interiorized space of ambient production. Nestled in the outer reaches of rural Connecticut, Ümlaut pieced 12 compositions for this release, totaling over an hour, in which the idea of capture – both literally in the recording process and as an arrested individual – is visited over and over again, like an ethnographer's sketchbook of the self.

There are few rhythmic elements on Un Étre Humain Ordinaire, which causes the whole album to drift, moving between sound sources and devices without predetermined structure or pattern. The effect on "Everything Is Appearing On Its Own," is creepy, as if the self-referential crux of the track might gesture to something beyond the composer himself, like a ghost or spirit. It is often cold and a bit creepy, this mood, with field recordings providing the echoed traces of absent footsteps or movements through undefined spaces. One technique, evidenced on "Artifacts as Media," is to push one sonic language against another, where these leftover pieces (artifacts) are layered not just for aesthetic but also methodological interest.

Un Étre Humain Ordinaire should appeal to those who are drawn to ambient works with a meandering, often hermetic character, as well as others who delight in the more conceptual, self-referential composers of abstract electroacoustic music.

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