From Captain Beefheart to Moby on down, blues lends itself to deconstruction. German producer and theoretician Ekkehard Ehlers referenced and sampled Robert Johnson for a single that wound up on his 2002 album Plays, weaving snippets of Johnson's voice and guitar into a minimal house. Loops and beats are one thing, but to engage with blues over an entire album, and to play it straight, seems a bit trickier. How might a guy like Ehlers, who dwells in the abstracted netherworld of Frankfurt School philosophy, fit into a style where authenticity is everything?
Pretty easily, it turns out. A Life Without Fear collects music originally written for a dance by choreographer Christoph Winkler, but no knowledge of that collaboration is needed to absorb this work. Working closely and writing with Cologne-based guitarist Joseph Suchy-- a shapeshifting player who can modify his style to fit numerous contexts-- Ehlers delivers a fractured but surprisingly thorough look at what blues means, where it has come from, and how it left its fingerprints. The overriding mood is heavy with doom-- returning often to death and apocalypse-- but even within this framework there's room for a huge range of expression.
The versatility of vocalist and harmonica player Howard Katz Fireheart is key. Katz is a U.S.-born and Berlin-based performance artist who leads a band called PostHolocaustPop; his singing here lends a sense of gravity and human frailty. He sounds brittle and haunted on the opening traditional "Ain't No Grave" and mean and strong-- and a lot like Captain Beefheart-- on the closing "O Death", made famous by Ralph Stanley. Suchy accompanies Katz's moaning with processed guitar that sound like it's bubbling up from a fissure in the earth; the way Suchy plays, there's no question where the singer is going when his last breath leaves him.
Typical for an Ehlers project, questions of authorship are completely up in the air and the record is difficult to fix in time. The guy who looped a few seconds of a Beatles recording for 10 minutes and called it his own work has no problem borrowing when it suits his purpose. On one track, a 78 of "Strange Things" from depression-era preacher Charles Haffer, Jr. is played with Suchy adding subtle guitar distortion and Ehlers adding bits of processed noise. The record is made more "modern," sort of, but simultaneously sounds even older than it actually is. The fidelity of the added instruments provides a "live" illusion, and it comes across like something recorded in a drafty old house in the early days of electricity.
My guess is that the Haffer track was chosen for its prescience, as the haunting lyrics have an almost creepy timelessness. The lines reach back to the Biblical John the Revelator, directly address the Great War, and then, by extension, move forward to our present-day insanity in a way Haffer never could have anticipated: "Now Wilson said to the Kaiser/ Please let our vessels be/ Kaiser said to Wilson/ 'Keep your vessels off of the sea/ If you put 'em on the stream/ They'll meet my submarines'/ Strange things happening in the land". Iran, anyone?
At the other end of the spectrum are the drifting, shapeless mood pieces that find Suchy spinning out crooked lines alongside trumpeter Franz Hautzinger, with electronics added by Ehlers (the trio recorded an album together for Staubgold in 2004). In a sense, these instrumental pieces serve to transport the record from one era or latitude to the next. While blues sits at the center of A Life Without Fear, the genre is sometimes hit sideways, by probing its roots and digressions.
During a mid-album stretch, the record covers 10,000 miles and several hundred years. "Die Sorge Geht Über Den Fluss" is jazz-- short, subtle, and lovely-- as Hautzinger's impressionistic melody seem to reflect the clear mid-range fluidity of Chet Baker. But nothing is fixed. In the track's closing seconds, another world pops out, as Suchy plucks his guitar in a manner referencing the West African kora. The exploration continues on "Nie Wieder Schnell Sagen", a drone played by Fireheart on harmonica, and "Misorodzi", a piece by West African professor Dumisani Maraire featuring Suchy on balafon and vocalist Fireheart singing lyrics in the regional Shona language.
So it's Blues (Not Blues), maybe. It looks chaotic on paper, but Ehlers has bound the disparate tracks tightly into a singular concept. In the end it's more about the possibilities inherent in a particular constellation of music's universe more than any one style. Ehlers turns the blues in its broadest sense inside-out, pulls it apart, and lays the shreds on the dissecting table while keeping the tissues very much alive. I can't imagine a better artist for the job. Ehlers is a true original who has never made the same record twice, and this is one of his very best.
