Like any dandy worth his salt, Superpitcher knows how to balance dewy-eyed sensitivity with wily eccentricity. In the early 2000s, when European minimal techno tended toward resolutely functional, unsparingly Spartan beats, the German producer oozed druggy melancholy on songs like “Heroin” and “Tomorrow.” Superpitcher (aka Aksel Schaufler, long one of the leading lights of Cologne’s Kompakt label) slowed his tempos to a crawl, fleshing out spacious club anthems with fluttering Hammond organs and feathery acoustic guitars. He covered the Peggy Lee and Sarah Vaughan staple “Fever” and Françoise Hardy’s schlager hit “Träume”; his song “Sad Boys,” kissed with throaty whispers, came long before emo rappers like Yung Lean popularized the trope for a new generation. And with his remix of Dntel’s pre-Postal Service song “(This Is) the Dream of Evan and Chan,” he inaugurated an entire wave of cottony emotronica for which there was little precedent in European club music.
Over time, his quirks came to the fore. In 2007, he teamed up with Michael Mayer on the deeply irreverent (and in retrospect, largely irrelevant) Supermayer project. Six years after his debut—at the time, it felt like an eon—Superpitcher’s second album, Kilimanjaro, went gonzo with gusto, suffusing disco-indebted house tracks in see-sawing frequencies and stoned philosophizing (“Rabbits in a hurry always drink too much/Too drunk, too drunk/You’ll get used to the confusion”). And in the duo Pachanga Boys, with the similarly irrepressible Mexican producer Rebolledo, he subsequently doubled down on heady excess. Their trademark single “Time” dissolves into 15-plus minutes of hedonistic rapture; in 2013, they made headlines with a 25-hour DJ set.
Seven years after Kilimanjaro, Superpitcher’s new solo endeavor renews that commitment to duration. As if to make up for lost time, Schaufler has come up with an ambitious proposal. In the fashion of a 19th-century serialized novel, The Golden Ravedays has been trickling out in installments all year long, two tracks every month. And for whatever reason, those tracks have been, without exception, unusually long. Let’s run through the numbers: None of the album’s 24 songs is under 10 minutes, and the longest is nearly 20. The full album is just seven minutes shy of six hours long. You could hit play on the opening “Little Raver” as you were rolling away from the gate at JFK and, weather permitting, the final notes of the closing “Punky Reggae Party” would fade out right about the time your plane docked at LAX.
Along the way, Schaufler covers a lot of ground. Atop programmed pitter-patter and leathery hand percussion, he layers all manner of tricks: twangy steel guitar, twinkling harp, wolf howls, and unhinged wails. There is a surprising preponderance of Ethio-jazz saxophone. “Burkina” evokes mid-century exotica in wispy Theremin and rainforest effects, while the bluesy “Bluesin” shines thanks to its uncredited African vocalist. (A shame about the press release, which suggests a children’s book fashioned after Heart of Darkness: “Rumor has it that Superpitcher visited South Africa and adventurously traveled into the deep bush-bush where he met new friends with captivating voices who speak in enchanting tongues.”)
In sound and spirit, The Golden Ravedays represents Superpitcher’s most seamless fusion yet of sad-boy dreaminess and playful hijinks. The beats are largely atmospheric and the atmospheres positively ethereal; it’s all shot through with a subtly twisted undercurrent, like the giggly iridescence that everyday objects take on when you’re on your second or third straight day without sleep. The opening track sets up the premise pretty well. “Hey little raver/Where have you been?” Schaufler asks, in his slightly tuneless coo, over a ruminative Rhodes loop; in a dreamy sing-song, he answers himself with a self-evident reply: “Raving.” It’s morning-after music for party people still wearing traces of the night before.
Based on the highlights, that party sounds like a bacchanal for the ages. “What Do You Miss” smears slide guitar, kittenish mewling, and chorused saxes over a drawn-out dembow rhythm. “Andy,” a tribute to Andy Warhol, is crisp, slashing robo-disco bathed in sparkling harmonics. A few songs mark the welcome return of Superpitcher’s trademark velvet touch: The brooding “Hiding” is mournful ambient house, while “Pocket Love” borrows the bright synths of classic Border Community and sets them on a slow simmer. But he might be even better when he ventures further afield. “Brothers” sounds like a Daft Punk epic burnished to a brilliant gleam; the new-wave/krautrock hybrid “Protest Song” is a a weird, wooly take on minimalism that unfurls spooky whispers over thrumming toms and jaw harp, sounding a little like a jug-band Bauhaus.
Occasionally, though, he can’t quite move beyond memories of the 1990s’ home-listening electronica: “Let’s Play Doctor,” with its jazz flute and drum ‘n’ bass groove, might be something off Mo Wax’s Headz 2 compilation, and other songs are dead ringers for DJ Shadow, Röyksopp, and Kruder & Dorfmeister. And if the best tracks earn their runtime, many do not. In fact, a back-of-the-envelope tally suggests that, put together, the outros alone account for more than an hour of the album’s expanse. In other words, you could make a substantial, full-length ambient LP simply by pasting all the beatless bits together—and you’d still have almost five hours of dance music left over.
Whatever kind of reverie The Golden Ravedays is meant to induce, the album ultimately feels self-indulgent. That’s a shame, because even at his weirdest—sometimes, especially at his weirdest—Schaufler is exceptionally good company. “Punky Reggae Party,” for instance, is loopy in the best way, and on the right kind of dance floor, at the right time of silly o’clock, you might happily twirl along to its post-punk bassline and mantra-like vocals for upwards of a quarter of an hour. But The Golden Ravedays is crying out for an edited version, something to distill all Schaufler’s jokes and poems and scribbles into a manageable frame. Life is short, and Superpitcher’s music is too endearing to be turned into an endurance test.
