Barbara Morgenstern's music is part of a minor revolution that not only fused indie pop with techno, but helped synths convey indie pop's oblique romanticism as well as a clumsily played acoustic guitar could. When she first started releasing tapes in the late 1990s, she was part of a Berlin scene named Wohnzimmer music, meaning "living room," because the living room is where they played shows. And though she's worked with Thomas Fehlmann and Pole, whose ties to pop forms are theoretical at best, Morgenstern never capitulated to real techno-- even when her songs run long, they're still songs. But her music was also never as friendly as her peers', most of whom are basically turning into footnotes in the Postal Service's bio-- by comparison, Morgenstern sounds reluctant, evasive, never cute enough to cuddle. That she never got the attention she deserved makes sense-- it feels like she never really asked for it.
So while other artists might take a greatest-hits occasion to pile on the makeup and make a case for canonization, Fan No. 2-- which serves as both an early-works compilation and a greatest hits-- is as understated as any of Morgenstern's albums. Despite having six full-lengths and a few EPs to draw on, the greatest-hits portion of this 2CD set has three new tracks, including a cover of the Beatles' "Blackbird" (which, in a gesture that proves Morgenstern is more interested in art than idol worship, turns Paul McCartney's folksy schmaltz into club-pop). "The Operator", her poppiest track-- the best evidence she could've been better-known if she decided that's what she wanted-- is featured as a "piano" version, without the blippy little drum machine that made the original usable on the dancefloor. "Der Augenblick" shows up as a previously unreleased remix. "Das Wort" was taken from an obscure EP. These are the kinds of choices that'd feel frustrating or self-deprecating in the context of other artists, but with Morgenstern they're expected-- the same kinds of choices that have made her career consistently interesting.
The second disc here collects two early EPs, 1997s Enter the Partyzone and Plastikreport, previously released only on cassette. Lo-fi, minor-key, and lead mostly with cheap-sounding keyboards, they're like a less severe and more tousled version of Young Marble Giants-- the kind of music whose smallness lends it a paradoxical strength and resilience. They're not nearly as sophisticated as the sly, spacious sound she arrived at on 2003's Nichts Muss (my favorite album by her), but they're pretty great examples of her unusual instinct for harmony and melody-- on songs that are mostly between two and three minutes long, it's hard to figure out how she takes all the turns she does without making a mess. Compositionally, she lives at some imagined intersection of 60s spy-movie soundtracks, lounge, and cabaret, the plaintive, mashed-potato familiarity of Anglo indie-rock, and the computerized Euro-folk of Kraftwerk. Like all of her songs, up through "The Operator" and the new ones included on the greatest-hits disc, they feel like they're partially obscured or have their back turned-- they're all curve balls.
It's not that Morgenstern's music is alienating or that a listener would have to be that patient to hear what she has to offer, it's that what she has to offer is licorice or a lemon square-- a lot of people just aren't going to like it. Still, the difference between her and other electro-pop artists that nobody namechecks anymore is that she's the only artist who can offer what she offers. At this point, the synthification of indie rock is so familiar to listeners that it's invisible-- it's worth bringing up only if we're talking about historical trajectory. Albums that might've sounded groundbreaking in 2001 or 2002 sound quaint now, or like the building blocks of something better. Barbara Morgenstern never really broke a lot of new ground-- ironically, it's a big part of what makes Fan No. 2 sound interesting today.
