The past 15 years saw a common rite of American manhood: driving through a neighborhood in the dead of night; staring at passersby with a homicidal glint, and trash-compacting your soul with a CD of electro-bass molesting your car's subwoofers. Clichés about "auto-erotica" aside, there is something peculiar about having so many egos become inflated by monotonous basslines.
I thought about this rite when I first played Thomas Fehlmann's second solo album, Lowflow, in my car's time-tattered, circa-1987 stereo. All of its details-- the choral hums, synth spasms, faux Middle Eastern melodies that could charm garter snakes, etc.-- were lost. Only the depth-charge basslines and clanking hip-hop beats were left. The music itself is now German dub as crunk. This treatment is nothing new as labels like ~scape, Merck, and sometimes one too many glitch-hop artists explored that connection. However, Fehlmann's minimalism admirably scrapes out landscapes with charcoal and flicking watercolors here and there. He also hails from over 25 years of importing Detroit techno into Berlin, engineering/producing The Orb's Earth Day acid-picnics, and contributing to the ~scape and Kompakt labels-- all lending further credibility. Oh, that and the fabulous Bob Mackey-style rendering of a pom-pom on Lowflow's cover, as done by legendary SoCal punk artist Raymond Pettibon.
Opener "Goldhaar" sketches the album's template with its Hollywood espionage soundtrack of icepick stabs of bass, drilled brass synths that blurt their name, and an odd, droning medieval choir. The following "Prefab" continues the tone, spicing in steadier smacks, some decent Middle Eastern reeds and dolphin-like rattles. The too-brief "Interstellar" deftly kicks in the crunk through a vintage German digital-dub jaunt, while the briefer (39-second) "Intertwine" hammers junk-metal on the one. Elsewhere, Fehlmann further proves that he did his undergraduate studies on Dirty South hip-hop on "Intersect" with its marrow-thin handclaps, but the peculiar time-stretched clavichord tone earns his work a "B-". As what's common with quite a few German dub artists these days, he sometimes drops Weather Channel soundtracks that try to spice up coverage of seasonal, partly cloudy and 68-degree weather. The guilty are "Lindt" and the overpolished Bill Laswell-style dub of "Slinky".
Fehlmann's biggest strength is treating a dub groove like a storm-drain; allowing random detritus to fall into the rainwater and steadily drift along. "Springer" resembles a live band jamming along to a busted ghetto blaster; as ham radio transmissions sputter with a looming machina bassline. "Andrea Is Delighted" is a year-in-a-day trance that sets a Kompakt-style whirlpool orchestration to a classic Berlin dub strut that flickers like a skyscraper's office lights gone haywire. The closer, "Fellmaus" was a leftfield, grime-dub oddity on ~scape's digital-dub comp, Staeditizism (2000) with its spider-spun cymbals wind chime marimbas, and time-mutating rimshots. That track's inclusion on Lowflow now makes it seem that Fehlmann only gave a 15-percent expression on this album. He's forgiven, but that's quite deadly for a minimalist record.
