I really can't stand these Windows Media Players that pop every time I slide a disc into my work computer. This shitty Microsoft accessory tries to sync up every CD shoved up in it with some early 90s rave FX. Right, the perfect visual to go with Slayer's Reign in Blood is slowly undulating blue waves, just as the "bars and waves" setting does so much to enhance listening to Solomon Burke.
In a curious accident that is the exception, I have this minimal green-line circle that bristles and wiggles its circumference along to the fourth album of the ongoing postal collaborations between Germany's Harald "Sack" Ziegler and Frank Schültge Blumm, and it looks about right, even echoing the little line-drawn red flowers that are sprinkled around the cover. Simple and quite aware of its shape, the duo are about cute and barely digitized movements, the natural rhythms that arise out of their acoustic materials being the foundation for each and every song.
Things haven't changed too much from their first release, Shy Noon (on the Gefriem label). And it definitely continues the naïf explorations carried out by FS Blumm on his solo release from earlier this year. A varying palette of folk instrument curios, ranging from kalimba, tabla, toy piano, mbira, melodica, knitting needles, sheet metal, etc. are stroked for simple melodies or fragmented rhythms and then stitched back together digitally into little vignettes.
"Cassius Carrera" surprisingly recalls fellow countryman and acoustic instrument alchemist Hans Reichel. The weird near-vocalized gurgles here, as well as on "Baby Bass Box", recall Reichel's most bizarre creation, the daxophone, a bowed or tapped sliver of resonant wood that produces "talking" qualities that scarcely resemble processed vocals, yet retain that nearly human aspect. "Maria Mbira" is constructed from the thumb plucks of that instrument, mixed with just a dash of early Residents horn burp for a mildly discombobulating three minutes of childlike pop. That wobbly walking melody on "Shop Beats" dreamily recalls the innocent structures graced Nobukazu Takemura's Child's View recordings, but with an instrumental array that twinkles like his clear and clement "perfume" recordings for Issey Miyake.
Sack und Blumm even bring out some of that thin rubberband funk that Mouse on Mars have played with for "Bass Car", before winding down with some tin frog throats croaking over a bit of dream organ for naptime. With near wordage, "To Go To" is a lullaby with the awkward grace that only a father can hum through his nose when it's beddy-bye time. Toy motors rev, little red cars grasped at with new hands, and the overall purr of playing attains a tender level that bodes well for baby sleep snuggled in soft blankies, with mildly critical thoughts about primitive dreamtime drifting past in such a way as to seem like child's play to these pops.
