Earlier this year Tom Ewing wrote a Poptimist column about records with interesting backstories that were probably false. The music released under the name Ursula Bogner-- first an album called Recordings 1969-1988, now a follow-up collection called Sonne = Blackbox-- is an excellent example of what he was talking about. Released on Faitiche, the label started by veteran electronic music producer and theorist Jan Jelinek, this music is purported to come from a woman who was completely unknown during her lifetime and died in 1994. Bogner is said to have lived a life as a housewife and experimented with electronics and tapes away from the public eye, and the music she left behind fits loosely with that made by BBC Radiophonic Workshop experimentalists like Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire.
Instead of maintaining the ruse as a cynical PR cash-in-- which would be silly because, let's face it, very few people are going to spend money for this music-- Jelinek is treating the Bogner phenomenon as a multimedia art experiment with musical, textual, and performative components. This second set of Bogner-named works, allegedly curated by frequent Jelinek associate Andrew Pekler, comes packaged with a 130-page book that explores, in pieces written in both English and German, ideas of identity, ownership, gender, and more, along with probing how information is transmitted through the media.
There's a piece in the book by songwriter and commentator Momus and lengthy interviews conducted by Jelinek, where, among other things, he interrogates people on why the Bogner story seems fake. The interviews in particular are an essential part of this project, because they get at how listeners construct narratives around music. One answer to Jelinek's question about the skepticism surrounding Bogner boils down to the press release being too detailed as far as her biography and making too much of her being a housewife. The exchange highlights how music journalists glean "truth" from the printed matter they are presented with recordings, and how this exchange can be manipulated. Beyond the accompanying book, Jelinek and Pekler are currently playing the music of Ursula Bogner at shows, improvising new music to accompany her "old" tape loops.
In addition to the writing, the book, and the live revue, we also have this, an album of recorded sound that, given its unspecified origins, exists in the context of your choosing. And I'm happy to report that the music is mostly very good, especially if you are a fan of Jelinek's loop-based aesthetic and unfailing ear for texture and musical structure (an approach to sound that has a great deal of overlap with Pekler's recorded work). Whether created by Jelinek, Pekler, or someone else, the Bogner pieces range from engaging electronic curiosities-- notable mostly for mixing vintage-sounding electronics with editing that would have been very difficult to achieve in the year they were supposed to have been created-- to hair-raising collages whose subtle force is, if you're wired at all like I am, completely overpowering.
The pieces here have a general theme, and that is the manipulation of the human voice. The opening title track mixes a banging piano loop with gorgeously rendered vocoder tones, conveying that peculiarly 1950s Disneyfied optimism about the happiness of a robotic future. "Or Dor Melanor" consists of a female voice singing the title's words laid next to some weirdly distant vocals processed into an ascending scale. "Shepard Monde" is a cracked assemblage of French syllables that sort of hangs together in a twitching clump, but the effect as it moves between the speakers evokes both mystery and profound beauty. "De Planetarum Influxu" mixes sine-wave squiggles and a deep drone with a mass of unclassifiable and machine-like voices that seem to be drifting steadily toward you, and then, at the moment when they could get no louder, the piece abruptly cuts off, ending the album on a jarring note. It all works together and there's not a dull patch on the record.
The tracks without vocals mostly recall the kind of elemental electronic tinkering present on the earlier Bogner release, but in ever case the dusty electronic pulses are brought to life with a sense of rhythm, movement, and texture that can be easily connected to records like Jelinek's Kosmischer Pitch and Pekler's Cue. If this were a new album by either of them, it would be enjoyable and ultimately successful purely from a musical standpoint, but packaged as it is as part of the Bogner project, the music can't help but take on a different cast. If nothing else, Sonne = Blackbox is an excellent reminder of Jelinek's restless muse. He made a name with an unusual approach to sound developed during the IDM heyday of the 1990s and early 00s, but he's never stayed in one place long, and every project he's been involved with since offers an unfamiliar but ultimately rewarding world to be explored.
