Cocoon isn't really an albums label. The eponymous imprint of Sven Väth's extensive club and promotions empire-- which includes a massive Frankfurt super-club, high-profile Ibiza parties, and a booking agency-- normally focuses on clubland's low-hanging fruit: hit singles, either packaged on their own or used to drive sales of compilations or high-profile DJ mixes. Say what you will about Väth's madcap antics, he knows how to pick'em. Both Cocoon's Sound of the... Season mixes and its lettered compilations manage to set the tone for populist but quality dance music that straddles the line between underground and mainstream, always highlighting an intriguing balance of old guard and up-and-comers.
But Cocoon seems increasingly to be focusing its efforts on artist albums; last year came Guy Gerber's Late Bloomers and Pig & Dan's Imagine; now Dominik Eulberg follows last spring's Heimische Gefilde with Bionik, an album that takes its title from a picture disc Eulberg released on Cocoon in 2006. Eulberg's never been much of an album artist himself, however, despite the fact that this is his third longplayer. A singles artist par excellence, he excels at the short sharp shock of a killer percussive riff, modulated and drawn out over the course of eight or 10 minutes.
The best tunes on Bionik do just that. "Lotuseffekt", an edit of the "Bionik" single, explodes a synth-poppy arpeggio into something grand and unbridled; the lead keyboards are inflected with trance music's shivering detunings, and the bassy counterpoints are tailor made for spinning deliriously. "Löwenzahn-Luftwaffe", likewise, sinks its teeth into an anthemic melody while it busies its hands on batucada-like drum fills. The rhythms on both numbers are far more controlled than is usual in Eulberg's productions, eschewing chaos and clatter in favor of controlled grooves; "Freche Früchte" benefits from the same kind of concentration, highlighting ghostly tonalities hovering like halos over his electronic toms, and a snare sound so perfect it'll have bedroom producers buzzing the Ableton forums in search of the sample.
Album centerpiece "Autopfoten" is one of the heaviest things Eulberg has done yet, letting a chugging, unfussy drum track serve as the foundation for gradually unfolding rhythmic variations. Oblique vocal samples suggest dark forces lurking in the background, as Eulberg plies his favorite trick, a clave-like cowbell pattern cutting crosswise through the headlong rhythm.
But a handful of solid tracks does not an album make; that's why dance music invented the double 12" single. "Rückenschwimmzipper", despite a promising (and punishing) intro, quickly descends into short-attention-span churn, marred by gratuitous bit-crush effects and an offputting, overly digitized breakdown. "Haifischflügel" spends six minutes clattering around in the dark, beating its virtual sticks against every surface it can find and tripping over weird potholes of silence and grinding, atonal dropouts. It might be a monster on the dancefloor, but at home its erratic behavior verges on the annoying. Then, after almost six minutes of its bull-headed onslaught, the clouds open up to reveal a golden beam of light-- a lovely, wordless vocal (or synthetic vocal) duet that recalls Medieval polyphony. There's something to be said, I suppose, for reserving such a bounty for the climax, but it seems a curiously counterintuitive approach to the album format.
As though nodding to the needs of the home listener, Eulberg opens and closes Bionik with more contemplative pieces that reference Autechre's plangent tones, but they're not glue enough to bind the shrapnel-pocked pieces of the record together as one. Bionik is reportedly titled in reference to scientific inventions that ape natural technologies, such as aerodynamic materials that are modeled upon sharkskin's streamlined properties. It's a great concept; unfortunately, there's too much heavy lifting involved in sifting through the album's pieces to let the idea shine through on its own. For his next experiment in bionics, a little less Steve Austin and a little more streamlining would do Eulberg a world of good.
