Electronic music's movement through trends, like Moore's Law, is constantly accelerating. Advances in software and technique lead to new sounds and structures, which are then absorbed quickly by an artists' community that takes light-speed dissemination of information as a given. And then, just as quickly, the trends become tired. Or maybe it's the listeners growing weary. While "keeping up" with rock music has always been a matter of finding who is writing the good songs, experimental electronic music is about a search for new feelings. Most of the time, when sliding a new CD into the tray, we're looking for surprises. We're talking about hard work.
Most of the time. What I love about the Stephan Mathieu and Ekkehard Ehlers collaboration Heroin is that it reminds me that IDM records don't have to sound new to sound great, and that a handful of these records, even though they're part of a zeitgeist tethered to fluctuations in CPU clock speeds, have a certain timelessness. On the surface, this record-- recorded between December 27, 2000 and January 2, 2001 in the Netherlands performance space Extrapool-- sounds very much like any one of many glitch-click-cut records released in the late 90s. All the familiar sounds are intact. And yet, Mathieu & Ehlers, during their week of recording, managed to tap into what made this trend so captivating in the first place. Noise and unpredictability can both subvert and enrich traditionally musical sound, and when you get the balance right, as they do on Heroin, the whole far outstrips the sum of its parts.
Heroin was originally released in 2001 as a limited pressing on the small label Brombron. It was a seldom-heard blip until Kit Clayton rescued it from oblivion by reissuing it on Orthlorng Musork, adding an additional disc of remixes to the package. Mathieu and Ehlers have worked together since, collaborating on the second "Plays John Cassavetes" track on Ekkehard Ehlers' Plays collection. That stunning piece of music, which looped a section of the Beatles' "Good Night", demonstrated that this pair likes to toy with achingly beautiful melodies. And indeed, Heroin is quite accessible despite the loads of theory Ehlers and Mathieu bring to the table. In the early going, this record could even be described as sentimental. The opening "New Year's Eve" mixes the sound of distant fireworks with a sad, wistful organ tune, and it's uncanny how much this music feels like a tiny black and white film. Images explode into my head with the rockets whenever I hear it-- abandoned piers, distant crowds, hidden faces.
"New Year's Even" fades into my favorite track here, "Rose", which consists of a short clip of keyboard music looped and reversed underneath a melodica melody. It's another example of what I was talking about earlier, where Mathieu and Ehlers take a device that's been around forever (reversed drums date at the very least from "Are You Experienced?") and make it fresh and moving. With its endlessly repeating backward keyboard pattern, "Rose" seems like the output of some kind of self-contained music machine, spinning out a single breathtaking melodic fragment that you could listen to forever. Then comes the heavily processed "Turkey Song", which takes "Christmas Time is Here" from Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas and warps the Peanuts gang's voices until the song sounds like a broken memory struggling through the head of an Alzheimer's patient.
The rest of Heroin takes a darker, dronier turn that's less emotionally direct but remains strong throughout. I like to imagine that the clanging keyboard that competes with the static in "Supertramp" is a half-speed sample of one of the notes from "Goodbye Stranger", but there's no way to know for sure. The first track named "Rausch" combines warmth with randomness in a way that reminds me of Microstoria, while the second "Rausch", which has thick curls of noise shifting slowly around a single held chord, almost sounds like Windy & Carl. Tracks on Heroin flow one into the next and all are at least very good.
The remix disc is spottier. Producers take extensive liberties with the source material and fashion something completely new, which is good, but they also happen to stay on a more abstract path, lending a degree of unity. Still, the subtlety and creative use of space that makes the Heroin record special is mostly absent from these reworkings. There's a good cast (Joseph Suchy, Nobukazu Takemura, Kit Clayton, Freiband, Christian Fennesz, Oren Ambarchi, Carmen Baier & Akira Rabelais), but ultimately they manage only two killer tracks. One is Fennesz' "Codeine", which already appears on his excellent Field Recordings 1995-2002 compilation. The other is Cologne legend Joseph Suchy's ":quque", which brilliantly incorporates his disorienting kaleidoscopic guitar technique. Beyond that, there's some interesting stuff, but nothing terribly special. As a bonus disc, the remix disc is just that, but the original Heroin has the goods, one of the better records of its kind to emerge in the last five years.
