Black to Comm, the recording project of Dekorder founder and owner Marc Richter, constructs deep textural worlds out of dark sound-moods, radiant atmospheres, and ambient drones. While so many drone releases embrace a self-defeating austerity or boring minimalism, Richter incorporates a healthy array of instruments that enhance and expand the unnecessarily and self-imposed limiting structure of drone music. Alphabet 1968 utilizes field recordings, sound collage techniques, vinyl static, and heavy electronics alongside more traditional instruments, including but not limited to acoustic guitar, piano, and Richter’s own mysterious kitchen gamelan. At first, the listener is radically disoriented by the sound of being in many non-overlapping spatial locations at the same time. But, gradually, the sounds unite and collaborate. The end result is a fascinating and sonically stimulating combination of seemingly disparate sounds and moods.
“Jonathan” opens the album with a rumbling drone that patiently sits underneath field recordings of children talking/playing and raindrops falling. These sounds are brutally disrupted by inarticulate voices and subway tunnel hums until the static of the latter is merged with the tingling of the former. The entrance of the ambling piano, which supplements a profound soothing effect to the harsh static, exemplifies Richter’s ability to transport the ambient drone aesthetic to innovative and unexpected places.
The ten minute long “Forst” provides some of the most terrifying moments on Alphabet 1968, namely by using a sound-expansion/breathing technique that induces suffocation as spaces are formed and blocked repeatedly. This textural effect leads to the beginning of a panic attack, hairs standing on end, and once the beat vanishes completely, we’re left floating with no foundation. Here, Richter is being, perhaps, sadistic: he creates sounds that stimulate deep breaths and a steady topography, but then rips it out from underneath us. However, the transition into “Trapez,” which keeps us joyfully/masochistically suspended in air and floating atop shimmering waves of chimes, bells, and electronically manipulated sounds, perfectly and pleasantly follows.
One of the best tracks on the album is “Musik fur Alle.” Richter produces a haunted complexity and dark-carnival sound-world that thrives on a feeling of anticipatory nervousness. The buzzing, glowing sounds spin around inside the listener’s ears like so many lightening bugs, eventually swirling throughout the entire body, bringing it alive. There is a recurring haunted house theme on Alphabet 1968. “Traum GmbH” is the perfect soundtrack to a horror film or haunted house, with its organ loops and ghost-vocals drifting eerily within the emerging rooms of sound. Another stand-out and absolutely terrifying track is “Houdini Rites,” which shows Richter creating an intense percussive wall of noise with metal objects. As the pace quickens, the furious pounding is accompanied by an overpowering hum of mechanical screeches and demon-possessed moaning. The feeling of aural (bodily?) danger that “Houdini Rites” creates falls over into “Void,” where the spectral growls and moans drift down forever into the groundless hum and sparkling gamelan.
Despite all this dark, horror language, it is important to note the playful edge that Richter so carefully navigates. While the feeling of terror on many tracks is oftentimes overpowering, there are others that embrace a more comical horror aesthetic. A video was recently released for album-closer “Hotel Freund” which features images taken from the 1972 B-movie Night of the Lepus, a story about unusually large mutant rabbits that bring terror to many people in a small Southwestern town. The song itself opens with a similar B-movie horror spirit, but eventually comes to resemble a blissful temper that would perfectly accompany an episode of Kung Fu or a meditative Czech New Wave film. As the sound of children playing returns, the same ones that opened the album on “Jonathan,” it becomes clear that Richter is playing with seemingly incompatible sound-moods and their histories as much as he’s playing with the sounds themselves.
This for the hardcore audiophile who finds the beauty in the physical transduction of soundscapes to vinyl to mind.
Also be checking his latest release of a double 7" album...BLACK TO COMM Wave UFO.
download BLACK TO COMM - Alphabet 1968