When the RVNG label went through the tape archives of Pacific Northwest composer/musician/sound artist Kerry Leimer for their 2014 release A Period of Review (Original Recordings: 1975-1983), Leimer was mostly unknown to 21st-century listeners. His last commercially available album, Imposed Order, was released in 1983 and if you were located outside of the Pacific Northwest, his string of experimental ambient albums and cassettes were hard to locate in the intervening years. What A Period of Review revealed was that—while Leimer was clearly indebted to the tape loop work of Brian Eno—his body of work showed that he was one of the few examples of American kosmische: minimal, melodic, and ethereal. Any number of musicians, ranging from Tortoise and Stereolab to Oneohtrix Point Never, have since taken up the mantle of German progressive music. But during Leimer’s early ’80s prime, Americans embracing the music of Neu!, Cluster, Harmonia, Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, and the like were virtually unheard of.
Since the RVNG retrospective, Leimer has slowly returned to the spotlight, reissuing long out of print albums like Land of Look Behind and Imposed Order along the way, allowing a generation of younger fans to appreciate his craft in depth. For his first vinyl release of new music in 25 years, Leimer’s Mitteltöner makes explicit this debt to his kosmische forbears, from the German language titles (the album translates as “mid-range”) to the sounds themselves. Rather than simply reiterate these ageless sounds, he has a knack for recasting them in an original manner.
Leimer’s love of kosmische is evident from the start, as opener “Dunne Luft” condenses the earmarks of that sound into its four minutes. There’s the solar flares of guitar that arise early on in the track, fuzzy and luminous, serving less as a lead instrument and more as a sonic texture. It sounds like a sly homage to the arcing six-string stylings of Neu! and Harmonia member Michael Rother, but rather than simply pay tribute, Leimer lets pinging synths bustle underneath and processes and loops live drums to keep the track’s momentum going.
“Werbemelodie” translates as “jingle” and it has a wispy, lilting melody that makes the title seem a bit on the nose. But Leimer’s touch is light, sampling just enough of a German voice and rumbling bass for added texture and letting tones ring across the rhythm, bringing to mind the dreamy, lullaby-like chimes that Four Tet had circa-Rounds. That sureness carries onto even shorter pieces like “As Long Ago as This,” with Leimer drawing together gentle rhythms and resonant electronic timbres.
There’s a sense of calm to the piece, but also a touch of shadow, a balance which carries over to the album’s centerpiece, the nearly nine-minute “Entferntemusik.” It’s this equilibrium that always differentiated Leimer from his fellow home studio musicians of the early ’80s era. While the West Coast New Age cottage industry was on the rise, these artists were also taking some of their cues from German electronic music of the 1970s. And while those suspended, luminous tones also appeared in Leimer’s productions, he also kept some grit and a sense of disquiet intact on his compositions. The tapped guitar strings that open “Entferntemusik” (translation “distant music”) take on the properties of a distant alarm, with Leimer adding bowed metal and industrial ambience to the piece, which unfurls like smoke from a power plant, growing darker and wider.
On closing track “Cafe Florian,” Leimer pays overt homage both to Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider and Popol Vuh founder Florian Fricke. The flickering rhythms bring to mind the blurry highways evoked on Autobahn while the ghostly melodies of the piece bear the evocative beauty of Popol Vuh. Rather than serve as mere pastiche, it encapsulates Leimer’s unique talents on his new work: drawing on a vintage sound now over forty years old and entering into middle age, while also finding a way to also push it forward.
