Last year, Berlin-based producer Andrew Pekler toured with Jan Jelinek as part of the Kosmischer Pitch band. He's been making music under several names for almost a decade, first gaining notice in 2000 as Sad Rockets, releasing Transition on Matador when the label experimented frequently with electronic releases. Though he's not prolific by the standards of electronic music, Pekler's method reminds me a bit of Atom Heart or Burnt Friedmann: each record is meant to sound different, based on a considered set of aesthetic guidelines. Pekler's time hanging around Jelinek-- after having previously been his labelmate on ~scape-- seems particularly significant here on his latest record.
For Cue, Pekler's M.O. was to assemble music using "library" records as inspiration. These are those weird LPs you now sometimes find in the "Misc." section of record stores, containing music for royalty-free "needle drop" use in commercial applications. Pekler took descriptions of the intended effect for various tracks ("slow, ominous piano motif drifting into swirling atmosphere"), and built new tracks, attempting to arrive at these moods from another angle.
Knowledge of his process is unnecessary for enjoying Cue. Pekler's use of such sterile material certainly contributes to the record's unusually disjointed feel, but these tracks don't seem tied to any particular era and certainly aren't meant for background use. His fondness for dense, overlapping loops as the basic unit of composition does, however, resemble the direction Jelinek has taken on his last two records, Kosmischer Pitch and Tierbeobachtungen. Each of these tracks sounds build from five or six or ten samples that are cut into pieces, set in motion, and allowed to bump into each other.
This approach, while necessarily limited in terms of dynamics, results in a handful of very interesting tracks. "Rockslide" even edges toward brilliant, with a droning tone up front that seems to skim along the surface of the beat like a stone across water, its pitch bent into chord-like shapes that, heard over steady floor toms, even manage to get a pretty funky. Indeed, the sound of drums throughout is striking and weird in a good way-- the extreme aridity of the beats opening "On" is the sort of thing Steve Albini hears in his dreams, and the exceptionally spacious "Pensive Boogie" sounds like a sack of assorted percussion tumbling down the stairs in slow motion, with some of the sounds moving backwards.
"Vertical Gardens" is one of the places where the samples show their age, the cheap synth outlining the chords evoking early electronics nostalgia in a manner reminiscent of the bubbly, bright electro-pop of Schlammpeitziger, but with an additional layer of abstraction. "Mote", one of a few short interludes that take one idea and runs with it for a minute or two, gets a lot of mileage from some cut-up piano bits, sounding like a player piano with a shredded roll that has been left alone in a decaying ballroom.
All in all, Cue is very subtle. Aside from "Rockslide", none of the tracks leaps out and demands to be regarded, despite the widely varying use of textures, tempos, and layering. But it's the sort of record that gets more interesting the deeper you get inside, as its old and strangely disembodied samples assemble into something new and occasionally even fleshy.
