The first time I visited Cologne, I suddenly understood where all those bell tones in Superpitcher's music came from: The city turned out to be full of cathedrals, and the steeple looming over my bedroom chimed a Gothic version of Kompakt's dreamy ambient shuffle every hour, on the hour. By this logic, Hamburg must be thick with bell towers, because virtually every release on the city's Dial label-best known until now for anchor tenants Lawrence and Pantha du Prince-thrums with brassy clangor.
The debut album from Efdemin-- aka Phillip Sollmann, who is also a member of the duo Pigon-- takes this tendency further than ever, reveling in the swift attack, fat decay, and lingering tail of struck instruments, whether real or synthesized. (It's strange and somehow charming that a record so subtle and, in many places, so soothing, could depend so heavily on such relentless percussive battery-- but then, the piano is a percussive instrument as well, and Erik Satie, whose fondness for blurry aftermath is all over this lush, resonant album, didn't exactly make heavy music.) Suffusing nimble, minimal-house constructions with melancholic melodies and counterpoints, Efdemin hammers on virtually every chime on the rack: glockenspiel, vibraphone, church bell, doorbell, squelchy 303 clone and other, more fanciful and definitely synthetic sounds, like the subaquatic anvil and the Berghain alarm clock.
I'd assumed that most of Efdemin's sounds were the products of FM synthesis, a form of digital synthesis that throws off overtone halos around every note. (The Knife made quite a big deal about FM synthesis when they released Silent Shout; you can hear its telltale shimmer in the steel drums of "The Captain" and the mallet-like chimes of "From Off to On", both from that record.) But it turns out that that's not the case: Sollmann told me that the opening track is sourced from field recordings in Vienna, where the MUMOK (Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation Vienna) is covered in grey basalt tiles that make a muted sound when struck. With that in mind, the track's title, "Knocking at the Grand", makes perfect sense: he's literally knocking at what must be the grandest mallet instrument in the world.
Seventy-two minutes long, the album never strains; it passes in a rose-tinted blur. That Sollmann plies many of the same ideas again and again is no criticism. Just as a rock band in the pocket settles upon its ideal means of treating, voicing and arranging a lineup of guitar, bass, drums, vox and whatever else they might throw into the mix, Sollmann has figured out a format that works time and again, offering plenty of opportunity for both timbral experiments and plain-old songwriting panache. Two tracks in particular prove highlights, however. "Lohn und Brot", first released as part of a split 12-inch single by the Liebe*Detail label (and previously covered in Forkcast), is an expansive, eight-minute wonder, slathered in shimmering chimes and as moody as your life. Acting like a perpetual motion machine, it seems to generate its own energy from the friction between its many contrapuntal melodies, and when the synths flare up at the song's climax, it feels like the heavens themselves are opening wide. "Acid Bells" is something else entirely: practically goth in its brooding, the song layers syncopated bell tones over an understated pulse of kick drum, brushed hi-hats and little else. Sollmann spends the first half of the song winding up a crescendo of sturm und klang; for the second half, everything unwinds as modulating delay snaps the real-time tethers and sends everything spinning into a dizzy, detuned din. Urgent and angry, it maps a space precisely opposite "Knocking at the Grand", knocking over that tune's architectural grounding and giving itself up to tempests from on high. Even moreso than the Field's recent album for Kompakt, Efdemin's debut album is a one-way ticket to the sublime.
