The Devil's Walk, Sascha
Ring's first Apparat album for Mute
Artists is perhaps one of the most absorbing and moving
pieces of music I've ever had the privilege of listening to. I write
this like I'm surprised somehow, but I shouldn't have been. I bought
all three singles released so far ('Ash / Black Veil', 'Black Water'
and 'Song Of Los') and with each one found myself deeply affected
by the way those songs played subtly with my emotions. Thus expectations
were raised fairly high from the beginning for The Devil's Walk,
though with that came the fear that the mood of those three tracks
couldn't be sustained across a whole LP. That fear was unfounded;
it can.
That said, I've not finding it especially straightforward
to write about The Devil's Walk, since the exact word that
I'm looking for to describe this album fails me. What I do know
is that there is a sense of unifying sadness, making the album less
about individual tracks and more about the overall sound. Uplifting
moments are frequent, but fleeting and unexpected. Tracks will be
progressing along a introspective, reflective path and then, out
of nowhere, a subtle chord change will allow the light to seep in
ever so slightly and just briefly, lifting the mood somehow; yet
that inward-looking feeling is still there, underneath, meaning
that those bursts of comparative euphoria, when listened to more
closely, are never actually that uplifting after all.
iTunes and Mute Bank's website classifies The
Devil's Walk as an 'electronic' album, which to me creates
a totally incorrect perspective on this album. Sure, it has electronic
elements and I dare say a lot of this LP came about after tinkering
with recorded sounds and vocals in some software package on a shiny
Macbook, but in terms of instrumentation it doesn't come close to
describing this album. There are guitars (looped, acoustic passages;
electric guitar patterns; what sounds like Stars Of The Lid / Labradford
drones and distortion overtones; possible plucked ukulele riffs),
reeds, harmonium sounds, strings and percussion that sounds like
Photek dismantling an alarm clock or Matt Herbert recording breaks
made entirely from the contents of his kitchen drawer. And everything
comes with layer upon layer of slowly-evolving sound.
Sometimes those layers produce something like the
opener 'Sweet Unrest', wherein the final layer to be added is some
dreamy choral vocals, giving this an icy spirituality. Sometimes
it's the dark reverb of 'Goodbye', where that Labradford connection
manifests itself with some clanging Spaghetti Western guitar sounds
in the vein of that band's E Luxo So, only with a constant
bass drum rhythm that is felt more than heard. Those subtle chord
changes and hypnotic vocals (from Anja Franziska Plascha) give this
an exquisite poignancy and a heart-wrenching quality. Sometimes
those layers produce the strained, almost Massive Attack stasis
of 'Candil De La Calle' where shimmering vocals play alongside a
multi-channel percussion restlessness of amazing intricacy.
'The Soft Voices' blends layers of piano, possibly
a dulcimer and a murmuring guitar sound in a way that I read about
Brian Wilson perfecting on Pet Sounds, whereupon he took
Phil Spector's methodology of layering sounds to a new level, leaving
the listener questing to know what this strange instrument they
were hearing actually was, when it was in fact many instruments
layered atop one another. Perhaps the knackered short wave radio
sound in the background is Sascha Ring's homage to 'Good Vibrations';
strings arrive unexpectedly; drums that wouldn't have sounded out
of place on Tubular Bells kick in; a sense of euphoria
is reached, only to dissipate suddenly, leaving a wobbly bass noise
and a fractured vocal from Ring. 'Escape' is delicate balladry,
an emotive vocal and lots of constantly-shifting, constantly-evolving
loops; it's the type of song that requires concentration to identify
the fact that it is indeed constantly developing, while the addition
of strings and ethereal harmonies gives this a filmic quality.
Referencing Tubular Bells above, perhaps
something like 'A Bang In The Void' is some sort of cross-generational
electronica-weaned response to Mike Oldfield's proggy opus, via
Terry Riley's In C. It takes a while to scale up via goodness-knows
how many layers of pretty melodic sounds - I can't work out what
the instrument is or isn't - and reaches a midpoint whereupon a
broken trumpet pattern kicks in. I'm also reminded of Erasure's
'91 Steps', as it shares some of the muted drama of that B-side.
Closer 'Your House Is My World' feels like it's
been lifted straight from a soundtrack to an indie flick that hasn't
been made yet, or maybe Grizzly Bear's soundtrack to Dedication;
very Yann Tiersen; very subtle; very processed;
very dramatic; I have run out of superlatives. I am frankly exhausted
from over-thinking about what that one word, that one crucial word
is that describes this album.
The album was released in a gorgeous limited edition
book CD format which includes lots of Gothic imagery, including
a child-scaring etching on the front cover straight from an M.R.
James ghost story. It also contains all the lyrics, and a read of
those reveals the word I was looking for all along in this review
- ephemeral. The atmosphere on The Devil's Walk
is one of ephemerality. Phew, I'm glad we resolved that. The limited
format also includes the bonus track 'The World Around You' which
is how Tears For Fears would have sounded if they'd been fed a diet
of glitchy drone electronica.
lp+cd/cd/lcd:
1. Sweet Unrest
2. Song Of Los
3. Black Water
4. Goodbye
5. Candil De La Calle
6. The Soft Voices Die
7. Escape
8. Ash / Black Veil
9. A Bang In The Void
10. Your House Is My World
11. The World Around You (LCD-only bonus track)
mute artists | i unknown | 06/05/2011 | track
listing
Like quite a few of Mute's new
releases in 2011, Apparat's 'Ash / Black Veil'
was initially available as a free mp3 file. It then subsequently
appeared on the Short Circuit edition of the Vorwärts
compilation in May, and then was released properly via iTunes..
'Ash / Black Veil' was my first exposure to Apparat,
the long-running project of Sascha Ring. Reviewing
Vorwärts I wrote thus: 'Apparat's track is like an
electronica-meets-classical music blend, a far cry from the far
harder releases that Apparat and T. Raumschmiere
put out on their Skitkatapult label. ' And I stand by that statement,
but having, at the point of writing this, fully digested the other
two singles from The Devil's Walk, I think I understand
this track better. 'Ash / Black Veil' has a slow-moving, plaintive
vocal but the musical backdrop - which definitely does have a Philip
Glass / Terry Riley minimalist dimension to its arpeggios, in my
view - moves along at a frantic pace, all repeated sounds, droning
Krautrock guitar, percolating synths, those Glass / Riley-referencing
organic sounds, odd percussive noises and rolling drums. Like everything
I've heard from Sascha Ring thus far, it's utterly absorbing and
highly confounding, and I love it.
mute artists | i unknown | 08/08/2011 | track
listing
'Black Water' was originally released as a free
mp3 by Mute several months ago, and now graduates
to iTunes as a one-track single proper. This is the second single
to be taken from Apparat's forthcoming first album
for Mute, The Devil's Walk.
The title alone provides a clue to the darkened
sound of this track – mournful, meditative vocals that remind
me at times of early Tears For Fears, a gently immersive electronic
backdrop filled with stuttering, repeated noises, static humming,
and fragile, cracked melodies; 'Black Water' has a delicate grace
which seems like it wants to grow into a strained euphoria but never
quite makes it. The track concludes with a long passage consisting
of nothing but the sound of running (black?) water which provides
an organic, ruminative and poignant end to this strange, but beautiful,
missive from Apparat.
Check out the very strange official video for the
single below.
Someone, somewhere, has described Apparat's
The Devil's Walk as sounding like Thom Yorke's solo record.
Aside from some 'Harrowdown Hill'-style fractured beats on 'Song
Of Los', the third single from the album (and the first to get a
physical release), I see few reference points to make such a lazy
journalistic comparison genuine. Like 'Black Water', 'Song Of Los'
seems to straddle the euphoric and contemplative, the joyous and
the plain miserable. The chorus of 'Losing our voices / Losing
our voices for that day' doesn't sound terribly unappealing,
like the feeling of having knackered your vocal chords after a concert,
but the verses tell a tale of wishing to escape, of disappearing,
all delivered by Sascha Ring in a manner which
suggests ruminative detachment.
The music, meanwhile, is probably the most confounding
aspect of all; 'Song Of Los' moves forward on those aforementioned
clipped beats but that pales into insignificance compared to the
enormous layers of constantly pulsing bass noise. If it was faster,
that combination of thudding anti-beats and heavy bass would be
reminiscent of some of Underworld's more club-friendly experiments.
Wordless vocal harmonies that sound like they could have been supplied
by Antony Hegarty drift behind the chorus while shimmering synth
melodies, backwards noises and sporadic liquid guitar patterns fade
in and out across the top. I am personally not sure you could find
a more poignant example of emotionally-stirring electronic music
today, but then again I thought that after 'Black Water' as well.
Remixes come from doom-mongers Mogwai and Park Frequency.
Mogwai's take is somewhat harsher with distorted vocals and lots
of buzzing loops and noises, yet also features a more stately electronic
beat than the original and optimistic, chiming synths. As a band,
Mogwai's howling torrents of leaden noise exist without the need
for anything so pedestrian as a vocalist, and that tends to mean
that they approach Ring's vocal as yet another instrument to be
toyed with. Park Frequency's mix ditches the monstrous bassline
and instead focuses on that jittery beat, adding softly-filtered
drones; jazzy breakdowns on the beat sound vaguely tongue-in-cheek
and the vocal is a little too far down in the mix to have the same
emotional effect, but the nice analogue synth layers of melody rescue
the mood from sonic confusion.
Apparat's 'Candil De La Calle'
was among the most emotional tracks to be found on Sascha
Ring's first album for Mute, a sort of
smoky, percussive track with all manner of rhythmic intricacies,
a Massive Attack-style beat and beautiful, soulful vocals from Ring.
Outwardly not the most uplifting of tracks, 'Candil De La Calle'
has a maudlin quality which, on the chorus, takes a surprising,
if subtle left turn into strained euphoria. 'Long have I waited
here,' sings Ring, with both regret and muted joy.
The 12" and download release includes a straightforward
dub mix by Ring and a new mix by underground music posterboy and
Touch recording artist Christian Fennesz. Fennesz's mix is grainy
and brief, the whole thing swamped beneath fuzzing ambience and
what sound like power chords turned into blocks of white noise.
The effect feels like listening to the music from two stages at
a particularly eclectic festival carried laconically across a hazy
early morning lake vista.
The release is rounded off by a remix of 'Black
Water' by DJ Koze (Stefan Kozalla) which lays the various components
of the track end to end and produces a result which retains the
ephemeral nature of the original and somehow manages to notch up
the beauty inherent in the second single from The Devil's Walk.
12"/i:
A1. / 1. Candil De La Calle
A2. / 2. Candil De La Calle (Apparat Dub Mix)
B1. / 3. Black Water (DJ Koze Remix)
B2. / 4. Candil De La Calle (Fennesz Remix)
