The bell sound on “Concept of Credence,” from Markus Guentner’s new album Extropy, is just the bees’ knees. It comes out of nowhere, through a crack in the dense clouds of choir-synth-string-harmonics that form the bulk of the record, and it’s so evocative as to induce a little bit of whiplash. Such a terrifically ancient sound makes for a great contrast with Guentner’s hyper-treated textures; it’s just about the last thing anyone would expect to hear on a record like this. The bell itself is such a loaded sound—so deeply intertwined with religion, ritual, death, and inevitability—that it’s easy to start thinking in outlandish, cosmic terms: Could this be the bell that tolls for all of us, floating somewhere in the seas of time?
Extropy leans hard into interstellar new-age aesthetics and sci-fi splendor. The portentous horn on “Everywhere” immediately conjures associations with Also sprach Zarathustra, the theme used in 2001: A Space Odyssey to announce humanity’s transcendence and in innumerable parodies to mock sci-fi self-seriousness. The rest of the seven-track album sounds like the searching, minor-key themes from countless science documentaries and space operas, amplified and blown up until it resembles the vastness of space itself. Within these ebbing, flowing sheets of sound, Guentner suspends lonely little instruments—a sonorous cello on “Here,” a sparkling vibraphone-synth on “Nowhere”—to approximate the luminous little objects that twinkle from the murk of the cosmos.
Guentner is probably best known for his association with Wolfgang Voigt’s Kompakt label. He appeared on the first eight Pop Ambient compilations, and his 2001 debut In Moll is a highlight of the label’s early catalog despite being clearly indebted to Voigt’s almighty GAS project. But Guentner’s textures have always been a little colder and more metallic than Voigt’s vivid swaths of sylvan psychedelia, and the compositions on Extropy have a steely edge that keeps them from feeling too weightless or incorporeal. They move like tied-down balloons, yearning to drift away but still tied to the constraints of gravity. There’s a heaviness to this music, which may have something to do with Rafael Anton Irisarri’s mastering. The Black Knoll Studio boss favors a gauzy yet bottom-heavy sound in both his own music and his engineering jobs for artists like Warmth and Loscil. It’s easy to see why he’d be drawn to a project like this.
Extropy does a great job of sounding epic and huge, but “epic and huge” isn’t quite enough to sustain the project over its seven-track, hour-long runtime. This music is too forceful to be soothing, too gentle to be buffeting, and without any contrasting techno-oriented material, as on In Moll or 2005’s 1981, the great, gauzy textures seem to swirl around vacantly, with nothing to stir them up. Guentner claims this music was inspired by the “pseudoscientific prediction that human intelligence and technology will enable life to expand in an orderly way throughout the entire universe.” But Extropy never really expands; it just pulses and contracts like an astral object viewed through the cold remove of a telescope.
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