Though he records under several different aliases, Germany's Sebastian Meissner is probably best known for his work as Klimek, his ongoing ambient-techno project that's been released on a handful of labels, most notably Kompakt. He's a regular on that imprint's annual Pop Ambient compilation but moved a few years back to New York's Anticipate for his full-lengths, starting with 2008's heavily processed drone suite Dedications. The final track on that record, "For Steven Spielberg & Azza El-Hassan", explored cinematic sweep and the notion of film music as home listening, and with his most recent release Movies Is Magic, Meissner applies that idea to an entire LP.
A high-concept piece, Movies Is Magic deals directly with the transportive nature of movie music, its ability to enhance a visual experience or add depth to a story. In some sense it's a film score without a film, and how much you buy into the academic narrative behind it-- the album comes equipped with a lengthy essay, penned by Meissner, detailing its relationship to the writing of Slovenian film theorist Slavoj Zizek-- will likely impact what you take away from its songs. Each of the record's tracks, which range from anxious, slow-moving ambient pieces to pastoral modern-classical drifts, seem built with an imaginary movie sequence in mind, and some are more successful than others at conjuring the feeling of losing yourself in a dark cinema.Movies Is Magic is unlike a good portion of ambient-techno records in that it mostly eschews the genre's usual vaporous bliss in favor of much gloomier tones. It's dark and cold and the prevailing sentiments are menace and dread. (One gets the sense that if Movies Is Magic were actually a film, it would look something like Let the Right One In.) But Klimek does his best work in these shadowy areas, on songs like "Abyss of Anxiety (Unfolding the Magic)", a glittering drone number wound tight with tension. These ominous moments overlap with his attempts at visual storytelling, and though not always successful, it's easy to hear in the rolling drums and Morricone-referencing arrangement of "Pathetic & Dangerous", for instance, that Klimek is setting the stage for a spaghetti western-style shootout.
If there's a central problem with Movies Is Magic, though, it's that it feels too much like a film score and not enough like an album. Which is to say that some of its tracks sound like background music, good in a supporting role but without the weight to stand on their own. That's true with "A Lament", which comes across slight and transitional, and the pleasant-but-forgettable "For Whom the Bells Toll". These uneven moments put on display the record's overemphasis of concept, and perhaps worse, keep Klimek from enchanting his listener in the way the best movies can.
