Band names are by nature so advertorial that truth in advertising standards ought to apply. Klaxons, LCD Soundsystem, and Pissed Jeans lead the way in responsible nomenclature, giving listeners an accurate sense of what to expect from the music. But the majority of band names are either meaningless or blatantly misleading. We could dispense with two of the most egregious offenders right off the bat by having Germany's Tied & Tickled Trio swap names with Australia's Architecture in Helsinki. The former's associations (giddy, quirky, spastic) attach seamlessly to AinH's disjointed pep-squad rock, while the latter's (stately, austere, glacial) handily summarize the sterile geometrical architecture Tied & Tickled Trio erect on Aelita, a quickie album (recorded in a handful of days) that abandons the group's usual electronic jazz (no horns) in favor of mechanically exact, interstellar wallpaper.
Tied & Tickled Trio's recordings generally begin in improvisation and end in careful arrangement, and Aelita is no exception, although you'd never know it from the music's rigor mortised strains. Unlike the group's excellent 2003 album Observing Systems, no trace of the moment's lyricism or joyous serendipity has survived the composition stage. Instead, heavy-handed ranks of xylophone, glockenspiel, and mellotron plod turgidly toward foregone conclusions, and the album feels like some quiet, remote place where dub and trip-hop slink off to die.
The three incarnations of "Aelita" are gauzy music-box minuets, variously obscured by mellotron hazes and ancillary harmonics. "You Said Tomorrow Yesterday" features a telegraphic rhythm track and Badalamentian chimes incrementally ramping up toward a post-apocalyptic shush. For bloggers, the following tags will be useful: Russia, sci-fi, 1920s. The brisk, splintery dub of "Tamaghis" is named for one of William Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night; the eerie ripples of "Chlebnikov" are an homage to Russian sound poet Velemir Chlebnikov, who died in 1922; the album's title might derive from Alexei Tolstoy's 1923 sci-fi novel about an expedition to Mars or the planned Soviet spacecraft named after it.
Given all of this movement, suspense, and heady atmosphere, the album's feeling of deep stagnancy is hard to fathom. Maybe Aelita does too good a job of capturing that "arcing through endless space in an escape pod" feeling, with its lugubrious pacing, constrained interplay, and limited palette: After the initial wonder wears off, the endlessness of space becomes rather dull. Maybe it's too monolithic in this mood of starry abstraction, which dominates every chamber of the album, and too inflexibly linear in its execution-- each song's dynamics ratchet up with such surgical precision that the listener begins to feel like a musical Nostradamus, able to predict with pinpoint accuracy when the drum track is about to sprout an extra shimmy or the xylophone fugue an extra kink.
Or maybe it's because we know, from previous Tied & Tickled Trio albums, Lali Puna's lively electro-pop, and especially the Notwist's still-stunning Neon Golden, that Markus Acher & co. are capable of doing more with less than they're doing here. At any rate, Aelita is perfect for art gallery openings, dinner parties, and scoring silent sci-fi films. But beyond its utility as a backdrop, it's an awfully cold, blank, and directionless void to trawl alone.
