Austrian-born minimalist Bernhard Fleischmann has put his two previous long-form excursions into the sublime world of minimalist electronica (1999's Pop Loops for Breakfast, and 2000's A Choir of Empty Beds) behind him. Those record displayed enough glitch-friendly melodic bliss to satisfy fans of both Prefuse 73 and Arvo Pärt, but with Welcome Tourist, he attempts, like his labelmates, to push the IDM envelope. Here, for the first time, Fleischmann has added a varied assortment of live instrumentation to his once-solo, groovebox-born musings: Fleischmann himself plays piano, drums, and vibraphone, and fleshes the mix out with saxophone, steel guitar, and looped slabs of musique concrete sampling which he has presumably collected while touring. Unfortunately, though this fusion of sonic elements has produced remarkably vibrant results on albums like The Notwist's Neon Golden, and Ms. John Soda's No P. or D., Fleischmann's double-disc Welcome Tourist is a stubbornly monotonous and solemn affair.
The album's twelve compositions (eleven on the first disc, and one 45-minute excursion on the second) are anchored around a quote from American political iconoclast Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. While Fleischmann's pieces seem too icily removed from Thoreau's heated, emotive writings, many of the record's formal components are tainted with their own brand of individualist politics. Part of the reason the album seems so distant is that Fleischmann no longer allows his melodies to take sonic center stage; each pristine melodic motif is shrouded under sweepingly oppressive and unruly blankets of distortion. In this context, Welcome Tourist seems to present an aesthetic power struggle among different layers of opposing musical strata. Rather than simply allowing these divergent textures to harmonize, Fleischmann aims to show that there will always be an oppressor, and an oppressed, striving for freedom.
These power roles remain in constant flux throughout the record. "A Letter from Home" features the subdued groove of a live drumkit holding steady under a wondrous piano theme reminiscent of Sigur Rós' "Untitled #1", only to be disrupted by boisterous rounds of wailing distortion and icy electronic meandering. Later in the track, the blissful calm of a saxophone (courtesy of Charhizma Records guru Christof Kurzmann) appears like a referee helping to quell the established aesthetic tension. The choppy hip-hop bounce of "Grunt" spotlights this same formal equation to equally moving results; a frenetic layer of crumbling sub-atomic sheen holds the muted gloom of tumbling piano notes and the interweaving rhythmic motifs of live drumming and skittering glitch-friendly pops under lock and key.
The shining moment of Welcome Tourist, as it so happens, is in complete opposition to the stark instrumental IDM gloom that populates much of the record; near the end of the first disc, "Le Desir" swoops in, a modest burst of pure glitch-pop exuberance. The song (which was previously released in another form, and is one of two non-instrumental tracks here) comes as a proverbial breath of fresh air, perfectly capturing Fleischmann's individual championing ideology without coming at the expense of his own music's energy. Over a bed of wistfully melting Rhodes notes and the minimal, driving bounce of electropop liveliness, Christof Kurzman sings empathy-laden lyrics like, "Yes, we have dreams, and we want them to come true/ Yes, we will live for these moments, me and you/ There's more to life than the everyday routine/ Keep this in mind until life becomes your dream." "Le Desir" is a rare inspired moment of unhampered sentiment, and its purity offers respite from the record of Welcome Tourist's bitter tension.
Much of this record can be summed up in its stagnant, 45-minute closure, appropriately titled "Take Your Time". Over the course of an album's length, Fleischmann projects a six-note piano motif within as many different stylistic cues as possible, from country to rock to IDM to jazz. Ultimately, though, like the project as a whole, the track is wildly ambitious, but unfortunately, far too refined to match its scope with any lasting sonic ingenuity.
