Spend too much time listening closely to music and you may find yourself obsessed with tones, ignoring the melody and rhythm that give songs meaning to most people. It’s a common affliction in recording studios, where one minute you can be doing something relatively mundane like figuring out the right placement for a hi-hat in the mix and the next thing you know you’re hours deep into microscopically tweaking an array of equalizers and compressors, feverishly searching for some sort of tonal nirvana.
Usually this is a sign of studio madness, but some musicians and producers have made it a viable way of working. On What You Hear (Is What You Hear), German minimalist techno producer Thomas Brinkmann has gone deliriously over that particular edge.
Minimal techno, a genre that revolves around compulsive sonic fastidiousness, is a breeding ground for tonal obsession—the picky ears of its makers and audience have played a major role in keeping pure analog synthesis alive and evolving during the periods when it wasn’t in style. Even within this context, Brinkmann stands out as an especially exacting engineer, and his recordings offer a sense of painstaking sumptuousness that stand apart from the rest of the minimal techno crowd.
What You Hear (Is What You Hear) is minimalist, but it’s not techno. Each track consists of a single tone held for anywhere between two and 11 minutes, with minimal modulation and no significant changes in dynamics or pitch. Rhythm is only occasionally a factor, and only emerges as a byproduct of the sustained sound’s internal pulses, never as a separate track. Ambient’s not the right word for it either, because the songs are too alien-sounding to settle into the scenery.
The static quality of the compositions don’t make for what’s traditionally considered an exciting listen, but anyone who enjoys dissecting what comes into their ears will find a lot of pleasure in What You Hear. It rewards listeners who take an active role in the listening, those willing to dig deeper, analyzing the elements in the sounds one at a time and teasing apart their structures.
But the record’s not just for obsessive audio freaks. If you engage with the songs on their own terms they’re fascinatingly evocative. "Ziegelrot" (which means "brick-red") is a recursive, juddering howl that sounds like the first feedback-saturated seconds of a cheaply recorded hardcore song extended to the length of an entire 7" side. "Mitisgrün" begins as something like the comforting white-noise pulse of a distant air conditioner unit and ramps up to a throbbing grind so slowly and subtly you’re likely to miss the point where it tips over from soothing to anxiety-inducing.
Brinkmann’s experiment in pure tonality is the inverse of the works where he’s effectively removed it from his compositions entirely, producing music that’s pure rhythm. In the incredible video of a performance at Tokyo’s Taico Club, he skillfully etches lines in blank vinyl on eight turntables and constructs a fully rave-able techno song out of the staticky pops the gashes produce. The only apparent direction he has left is to make a record that doesn’t have any musical elements at all. It’ll probably sound great.
