In a new year confronted with so much intriguing technology and music, the dedication of one's life to Casio keyboards requires a preternatural convergence of insolence, foolishness, and strangely consumerist fortitude. This willful deprivation may not quite be up to the same level as the infamous Ophir Prison Marching Kazoo Band, but, in its own quiet way, it seems as momentous and dangerous a sacrifice as anything religious leaders or secular professional sacrificers have ever undertaken. Like those ascetics, such loyalty deserves our begrudging respect, and no small degree of unfair ridicule.
Schlammpeitziger, as should be readily apparent right about now, is no stranger to this ambivalence. The name alone all but threatens reviewers to assume Jo Zimmermann studied music solely so his pseudonym could be insulted. Another prevalent assumption among those new to the great IDM fanclub (endearingly called Schlammpeitzigerverrückteköpfe) is that the reliance on such basic hardware (his patented "Casionics") will produce droll, maypole-circling, percolating bouts of paradisiacal plop-pop. And, indeed, it's typically nostalgic to the point where you run the risk of accidentally preventing your parents from conceiving you. To the vexation of all those who create altars to their Pan Sonic 10-inches, however, there's not a damn thing wrong with Zimmermann's cloyingly radiant sunshine-in-the-ice-cream-truck delicacy.
Everything Without All Inclusive is Zimmermann's first full-length since 2000, although the musician has been extensively name-dropped all over popular men's magazines since the superb compilation, Collected Simplesongs of My Temporary Past. The new album does not disappoint; it also does not thrill. Nevertheless, it's probably Zimmermann's best album to date. Strangely and unconvincingly, this claim rests almost solely on the fact that this record entirely abolishes any of the faint traces of diversity on his earlier albums. The opening track's menacing buzz may suggest some broad departure, but the warm, familiar fuzzes fasten the fate of the rest of the album as comfortably as Velcro. Distanced armament, circumnavigating valves and short-circuited beat-boxing all take their place as the delicate Casio mulls on and on, to the dismay of musical provocateurs and to the slothful joy of daydreamers.
The most jarring sound is the clickity-clack of a jacob's ladder. The stone-skipping beat architecture invites all sorts of geeky adjective-analopuns, but the best one has to be pseudo-biologic virogenesis: microscopic organisms scurrying around, finding a spot they can mitosimate/replicate/whatthehell for a moment, and ending their woefully short "life"-spans in a hail of soft bio-techno-Casio-bullets. It's never chaotic, but it sounds like if you left it unsupervised for 24 hours, things might get sort of rambunctious.
Even though this is undoubtedly an album about happiness, tenderness, and other out-of-date concepts, there are more than a few dark patches. He may play a Casio, but he's not always Cardinal Pollyanna's keyboardist, annoyingly saccharifying a black-hearted congregation. Okay, I lied: he typically is, but there are still those scorched brass blasts that might as well have come out of the Taxi Driver theme, and those abrasive scythes that could either be a harvest celebration or a Texas scythe massacre, um, harvest. Also, as someone who listens to breaths and wind a lot (because I can't figure out these damn headphones), I have the authority to note that Zimmermann's blustery wind (in the Winnie the Pooh sense, not the Hurricane Mitch one) is about as good as any around, finding the middle ground between Kraftwerk's ridiculous mechanics and the hyper-avant-garde's "no-thing" recordings.
For everything that recommends Schlammpeitziger, it is inevitably and undeniably redundant music; focus is not always compulsory, nor even possible. And the middle third reeks of mediocrity or worse: poor man's Atari music, bluntly stupid opera, creaking floorboards, overly derivative house, etc. The fifth track is flat-out, hard-lined nauseating for people that don't spend every waking minute at Disneyland. But the majority of the album is more of the same for people who enjoy that sort of thing: a harmless, even lovely, pleasure that may not exemplify standing-ovation genius anytime soon, but manages to easily and efficiently make comfortable, yet often complex, pop.
