It's only natural to want to translate the Germanic song titles of Dominik Eulberg, in part because they're said to derive from nature. No reference to Eulberg as a DJ/producer goes without mention of his also having worked as a park ranger, and what could be more novel than a German techno artist who talks about birds and trees when he's not busy being post-human?
It turns out that Eulberg's organic fancies are something of a vorläufige Emissionsprospekte (read: a "red herring," at least as per Babel Fish). Those fancies have proven significant in the past, most notably on his fabled DJ mix Kreucht & Fleucht, which evoked a sense of growing, evolving, photosynthesizing, and so on. But nature's calls rarely figure into what Eulberg's own work actually communicates, even when they're supposed to.
It's not for lack of trying. Heimische Gefilde, a collection of 12-inches strung together as Eulberg's second artist album, features a host of spoken-word passages in which the producer meditates on nature like a figure from a scholastic filmstrip. (The album title translates as "native habitat.") In one such passage, he talks about the uhu and mouths owl sounds to serve his subject. The owls are not what they seem, though, as per timeless wisdom gleaned from Twin Peaks. Even when his muse is ostensibly a bird, Eulberg's method draws on a decidedly mechanical mix of clattering noises and whooshing trance effects writ large and small. It's what makes him simultaneously minimal and maximal-- and not the least bit natural in terms of style or sound.
The spoken-word bits prove nagging to an ear unschooled in German, but the music that separates them rubs a lot of different receptors elsewhere in the head. Indeed, Eulberg's is a uniquely heady kind of trance, in which stirring drama arises out of details made hectic down below. Tracks like "Adler" and "Rote Waldameise" run the kind of atmospheric smears and sirens you might hear in a super-club over rustling, fidgety rhythms mindful of a basement techno dive. In "Die Alpenstrandläufer von Spiekeroog" (that's "the Alpine sandpipers of Spiekeroog"), Eulberg crafts a taut beat out of the wheezing sounds of industry more than anything winged.
Eulberg is at his best when he's at his busiest-- as in "Björn Borkenkäfer" and "Die Rotbauchunken vom Tegernsee", tracks that cycle through a musique concrète composer's bank of sounds in a manic rush. The beats shift to take in flurries of new percussive timbres, and Eulberg's trancey hand proves most deft when laying on swirling synths after the bulk of his work is already done. It's a technique that plays out in "Harzer Roller", a mesmerizing track that evokes the momentous glide of an airplane more than the flitting canary in its title.
