In a year in which some of the most successful ambient albums were extremely lengthy-- Brock Van Wey's White Clouds Drift On and On, Leyland's Kirby's 3xCD epic Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What it Was-- it's refreshing to find an album that understands the power of brevity. Black to Comm's Alphabet 1968 clocks in at a modest 43 minutes but probes the depths of ambient, drone, and modern classical composition with both restraint and imagination.
Like a lot of experimental composers, Black to Comm's Marc Richter has operated on the fringes for a half-decade, placing several releases on an assemblage of labels, including his own Hamburg-based Dekorder. Alphabet 1968, on the increasingly impressive Type label, functions as his first widely available release, and it establishes Richter as a deft composer and an inspired stylist.
The year 1968 permeates more than just the album's title, as the album's 10 tracks mimic the burbling, psychedelic compositions of German experimental music from that era. (Visually as well: the artwork bears a passing resemblance to Cluster & Eno, and the cheap-fade, dual-color tracklist reeks of import bin design hell.) More importantly, Alphabet 1968 privileges composition above method, repeatedly blurring the line between electronic and acoustic elements.
Alphabet 1968 opens in intimidating fashion, rolling through nearly a third of the album's run time in the first two tracks, the rain-drenched piano ballad, "Jonathan", and the thumping, beatific "Forst", which sounds like the Field stretched putty-thin. From there, however, Richter lets Alphabet breathe, favoring short pieces that bleed into and out of each other. "Rauschen"'s slowly thumbed acoustic guitar plays against an abstracted field recording. It lasts for just two minutes before segueing to the hectic music-box tinker of "Musik Für Alle". "Traum GmbH" features dollops of saturated organ noise.
Richter anchors Alphabet with the ghastly, haunted pointillist whir of "Houdini Rites" and the monstrous bass tones of "Void" before redeeming the mood with "Hotel Freund", a harp-tinged orchestral movement that features an overlay of children's voices at play. "Hotel Freund" is a fittingly warm finale for an ambient/drone album that never lets its sound world become too insular. Richter's compositions function on a similar level as compositions by Tim Hecker and Fennesz, but they're far less abstract-- this is a guitar, and this is a harp, and that is rain. This is by no means a revolutionary accomplishment-- electro-acoustic composers have long toed the line between the abstract and the recognizable-- but, combined with Alphabet's manageable sequencing and length, it's refreshing on the heels of lengthy, career-defining efforts by similar artists. Alphabet 1968 is an adventurous, intriguing listen, but it succeeds because it takes sound worlds many consider epic and scales them down to palatable, weekday size.
