The Gamble loosely explores and repurposes old informal recordings Frahm made with fellow bandmates Frederic Gmeiner and Sebastian Singwald in Germany in the early '90s. The recently reunited nonkeen recorded over and sampled mixdowns from the original, often degenerated '90s 4-track tapes, and used the same type of primitive recorders to record their new parts. The complex and troubleshooting-filled process gives the record both a welcome warmth and oddly brittle quality. The drums sound hollow and far off, occasionally like toy models of themselves. However, there is a richness to the analog-plus-digital method which easily transcends the characterization of "lo-fi."
The short record's unusual production style is essential because it helps shape and enhance its raw musical building blocks. Some of these pieces might sound a touch too non-descript if they had been realized in a more polished way. It's the cleaner, more straighforward pieces which feel the most aimless. But when the band restricts themselves to dense, blurry rhythms and unidentifiable timbres, the album shines. On hyperactive jams like "Ceramic People," the source of sound becomes uncertain and dizzying, giving the music a constantly destabilized feel.
The use of bottom-shelf, my-first-recorder-type equipment isn't just an aesthetic choice. It's also a huge source of the music's elements of chance or spontaneity. The finicky materials result in feedback and odd bursts of incidentally rhythmic noise which often become the highlights of the songs. On "Pink Flirt"—featuring Frahm's electric piano and organ—the tape slows down suddenly to create a majestic sweep. It's the album's central, disruptive climax. It's no accident that rather than listing the instruments they played on their Bandcamp credits, nonkeen chose to list the various dated recording devices used in their album credits; these machines are The Gamble's most important soloists.
Despite all the preoccupation with recording technique, the album mainly succeeds because it sounds like the work of a small group of musicians, jamming and building off of one another's cues in real time. This is not "serious," process music, and it doesn't sound like it. The classical reference points of Frahm's work as a soloist are evident in the music—Cage, the minimalism of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, the humor and plaintiveness of French turn-of-the-century composers like Erik Satie and Gabriel Fauré, and dignified, semi-New Agers like Keith Jarrett and George Winston. But in the context of the propulsive ensemble, points of inspiration are never pulled out and highlighted one by one; each of the three players seems to be culling from different places at once.
Influences that are new to Frahm's catalog crop up here to provide welcome reference points. Frahm's seething Rhodes piano, which recalls Joe Zawinul or Herbie Hancock, is a necessary arbiter of tension throughout the album, a playful element which helps to distinguish nonkeen from your average krautrock-indebted, experimental rock band. Centerpiece "This Beautiful Mess"—dominated by electric piano scare cues—sounds like something between Cluster, Mulatu Astake's noir world-jazz, and exotic slow-wax fusion that could have been pressed on ECM. Like all the best tracks on The Gamble, the live band sounds more and more unreal as the track builds.
Nonkeen's vocabulary is very familiar, sometimes verging on lackluster. But the band knows its own limitations, and charms across the record's duration. They quickly establish moods—appealing, slightly disparate shades of pensiveness, rueful theme music for some hypothetical arthouse drama—and then cut straight into the next well-realized idea. We aren't forced to listen to long pieces that are hoping to introduce hypnosis, as in the minimalist music or traditional krautrock that comes to bear on nonkeen's vocabulary; each song is simply a quick burst of energy. The Gamble sounds like the peek into a group of friends' private rituals that it is—as charmingly patched together and messy as it is well-paced and dynamic.
