A sample of Antye Greie's prior collaborators, including Ellen Allien and Vladislav Delay, gives you a good sense of her approach. She sweeps out the dark corners of electronic music, reclaiming whatever scraps of sonic information slip free from the nets of genres. These splinters of melody, bits of noise, subliminal streaks of rhythm, and bewildered voices are compressed into a nebulous whole. Volume is more important than harmony. Greie often operates somewhere beyond music, probing into sculpture, science, and math.
Greie's sixth solo album as AGF, Einzelkämpfer, is a mix of spoken-word, singing, low-key noise, and the occasional distended rhythm. Rather than building, her tracks keep flexing and doubling back. Some verifiable songs slip out of the haze: The title track, though it begins in a dripping tunnel of beats and warbles, emerges into something like dehydrated Fever Ray. And "Worin mein Mund Zur Bewegung Fand" sounds like Alison Goldfrapp singing in a junkyard where someone happens to be playing a Morton Feldman record at half speed.
But more often the music is just a receptacle for fantastic shapes and incongruous images. On the beautifully designed "We Break Out", with clip-clopping drums and a synth tone that keeps popping out like a broken spring, anxiously pitch-shifting vocal harmonies run alongside a calm recitation. It's a motif that repeats across the album. Greie keeps splitting into two beings, one impassive and the other freaked out, talking over each other. It's like those Beach Boys songs where the backing vocals contradict all the exhortations to have fun, but elevated to full-bore dissociative identity disorder.
"You invented language," Greie confides conspiratorially on "Alone in the Woods (The Fox, the Skunk and the Rabbit)", but Einzelkämpfer takes up the concept of the "lone warrior," (the word's English meaning) so of course, she's talking to herself. Before translating the German, you might gather that her dry, tart delivery represents what she intends to say, while its distressed twin is what the listener hears. It's challenging to box what we mean in language, and to ensure that the contents don't shift in transit. But the problem turns out to be simpler than that-- there simply isn't anyone to talk to. On "Practicing Beat Anarchy", she sounds out the words of the title roughly, as if trying to force some meaning into them. It's a solitary war of attrition. By closing track "On Earth", every trace of the communicative has vanished into a primordial ooze of voiceless low frequencies. After all the torturous expression, this arrives as an almost physical relief.
