Thomas Fehlmann's superb new album starts off in the middle of things, like it only reluctantly consented to be heard after the proceedings had begun. Its reluctance isn't a mark of ill will-- it's just that Honigpumpe doesn't really need you. Certain of its tracks would fit into communal rituals on a dance floor, but Fehlmann's work at this point, close to 20 years after he started working with electronic music in Berlin, sounds too assured and in thrall with itself to get worked up over questions it can't wholly account for.
That might prove a problem if Honigpumpe weren't so magnetic and warm. Both have long served as operative words for Fehlmann, from his formative days in the Orb (the epochal ambient-house group he still helps steer) to his current era on Kompakt. It's hard to imagine the label's vaunted limp-strut schaffel sound reaching the heights it did without Fehlmann's help, and it's easy to imagine the kind of historical buzz he brings to the wide-eyed house devotees in the Kompakt boardroom.
Like the Field's From Here We Go Sublime, a touchstone album it's sneakily better than, Honigpumpe traffics in mid-tempo electronic music that gulps and rolls. It takes a few tracks for the gulps to start: The album starts out in an ambient mood, with a gentle throb building through the first three tracks, before "Schaum" turns out the lights to focus on the glimmer of a disco ball set to spin. It's the kind of track a DJ might drop at the beginning of a set to announce his arrival with a portentous stir, and the fact that "Schaum" translates as "foam" won't surprise anyone with an ear for the billowing synth figures that that rise up from the hissy beat below.
It's when that hiss hits hardest that Honigpumpe finds its prime, in part because Fehlmann is so good at his brand of deep-focus production that even a banging beat skews as just one part of what's going on-- as a texture, a riff, a sign. To that end, "Bienenkoenigin" moves in time to a forceful techno march, with a mix of harsh metallic clangs and seething tambourines, but it also gets caught up in a playful mix of oompah pump that is anything but austere. Within the same track, you come to recognize one mood, then another, and yet another-- only to realize then that all had been there all along, lurking in the wrinkles that repetition smoothes.
Fehlmann and the Field share an affinity for the principle of the changing same, with loops locked into place and left alone, but tracks here like "T.R.N.T.T.F." and "100 Baeume"-- and others tucked within Honigpumpe's majestic second half-- stare down their patterns with more drama and drive. They sound like they're looking for something instead of getting lost in their lids-- which, of course, makes it all the more easy to get lost in your own.
