Bernhard Fleischmann makes it look easy, turning out sensitive electronica thick with detail and feeling. Lately, on Angst Is not a Weltanschauung!, his seventh or fifth album-- not even his label can agree on the number-- he's been wandering a little beyond his remit. An older track of his, "Phones and Machines", a standout from 2006's The Humbucking Coil, was a typical hunk of skittery digitalia, forthright in emotion and playfully oblique in composition. Angst 's "Phones, Machines and King Kong" builds on this track, riveting above it Daniel Johnston's "King Kong", diminishing the haunting quality of Johnston's heartfelt song. It's an impossible task, to hold on to the deeply personal resonance that Johnston drew into his song, but although it falters on those terms, Fleischmann's ambitious mash-up does offer a number of neat surprises.
The other collaborations trade in transformation, too, with a little more success. Take "24.12", where Sweet William Van Ghost stars in a miniature Christmas romance manque that hinges, improbably, on borrowing ice from a neighbor. Sweeter than this desperate gesture is Fleischmann's carefully programmed percussion, and the husky quaver of Marilies Jagsch, which blanket the song with a wintry sparkle, and maybe a bit of saccharine. But the flinty-widow feminism at the heart of it, and a Christmasy falling-snow guitar figure in the background, catches you off-guard with its delightful moral and sonic complexity. Another Van Ghost piece, "In Trains", gives over more space to the earthy tremble of his voice, an instrument that shares its rusty, heartworn finish with John Cale and Lee Hazlewood.
All these tracks work because they leave behind IDM traditions, more or less. Others are more faithful. Though it may not merit the iffy label "intelligent dance music," "When Last We Met at a T&TT Concert" points toward the bubble and glisten and space of Richard D. James's ambient period, the amorphousness disciplined slightly into a pop structure. Compared to the rest, however, instrumentals like this are not the standouts here. The idiosyncratic duets and mash-up make that clear enough, but for once, even Fleischmann's own notoriously flawed singing outclasses his wordless pieces. In fact, on Angst, the two tracks graced with his vocals (the eulogies "Even Your Glasses Miss Your Eyes" and "Still See You Smile") are among his most potent, less for their arrangements than for their somberly biographical, yet still expectedly off-kilter, lyrics of grief and memory.
Refreshingly light on self-seriousness, as the title likely gave away, Angst still manages to move. That upbeat exclamation, the kind of thing you imagine a Hegel professor yelling at his undergraduates, is dead right as a descriptor of Fleischmann's own musical bent. Since 2000's A Choir of Empty Beds, he has commanded a broad emotional palette absent in the ominous monotony and thoughtlessly turgid textures of that whole generation of cookie-cutter Aphex Twin copycats. All the way up to this most recent release, recorded in the wake of a friend's death, Fleischmann's subtly uplifting tunes have never lost the through-line of melancholy that winds back to his Morr Music debut, Pop Loops for Breakfast. Angst continues that upward curve of building complexity and nuance, owing no small debt to the chorus of new, colorful, delicate voices that, to take a phrase from his closing song, fill up Fleischmann's castles of memory.
