Can a record accurately "describe" a city or emulate its inhabitants' senses of romance, ennui, numb routine, triumph, and occasional need for escape? Avant-turntablists Philip Jeck and Janek Schaefer tackle those challenges on Songs for Europe, painting portraits of Athens and Istanbul by treading deserted streets and trying to reanimate those lanes and avenues with their recordings.
Jeck is a vinyl mortician who mixes discarded records and their decayed sounds as if circulating formaldehyde through their grooves. Schaefer finds peace in discord, employing his custom "triphonic" or three-armed turntable. His musique concrete pieces tend to evoke an ominous sense of mortal doom, yet enrapture in the process.
Songs for Europe fuses Jeck and Schaefer's methodologies as the pair chisel haunted soundscapes from Greek and Turkish records purchased in each nation's ancient city. The political baggage could be tremendous: Centuries of Greek-Turkish history are blood-written-- from the Ottoman conquest to the present territorial strife in Cyprus. The thematic dread of Songs could dramatize this conflict, but the music is so typically Jeck and Schaefer that such speculation is moot. While listening to their raw palette, it's instead easier to visualize over 2,000 years of history touchable on every brick of the Acropolis or St. Sophia.
The album's seven tracks are divided between the two cities where they were recorded, yet they all share a similar and rather monotonous mood. Jeck and Schaefer mainly chose to sample and bleed together folk records to sound melancholic-- often tying 20 pounds of rocks to string ballads floating on a river. Their looped samples also mechanize the soulful expressions caught on the records-- like faint memories that must be routinely recalled.
Istanbul is introduced in "Taxim", a funeral march that simmers with a boiler-room drone amongst scattered tinny, insectoid guitar melodies. Contorting the song's impact are abrupt blasts of corroded rock 'n' roll and random radio dial twirling. The stronger "Istanbul Drift" loops what sounds like construction site hammering while a Muslim prayer chant pollinates the air. Such industrial harmony brilliantly phases through a subwoofer-abusive bass rumble and a flower pedal-picking guitar solo. It's this symbiosis between the machine and the soul that makes Songs so unforgettable.
The Athens tracks are denser and glummer. "Song for Europe" melts accordion samples into a stream of ether with female dishwasher operas and oceanic drones sailing toward the horizon and falling off the world's edge. "Acropolis Now" (ugh), is another danse macabre-- this time led by prancing reeds and violins, along with a supernatural, stylus-flickered organ loop that pans between the stereo channels.
Making the best use of the seesawing stereo is the closer, "Lullaby Duel"-- the one instance on Songs that Greek-Turkish tension is potentially addressed. The first half of the track is a sore-throated ballad of gentle, harmonic feedback, bass guitar jangles, and sandpapered vinyl noise. A guitar duet then emerges from the mire, with each performer separated by the stereo channel. After they pluck a melody, they jump to the next channel to keep their careful distance. Jeck and Schaefer then let a turntable stylus run off the record and their phono cartridge buzz for over a minute. It's a reminder that recorded music is nothing more than domesticated electricity kept alive by machines.
