Thomas Fehlmann

To celebrate St George’s Day I took myself along to an Ether festival event billed as “Berlin Sounds”. Given their front pages this week, that is probably enough for the Daily Mail to paint me as a Nazi. Not sure what effect it’ll have on the opinion polls in the key marginal South Bank seat, where the entire population of London was otherwise engaged in much more Mail-approved behaviour (i.e. getting smashed on litres of Pimms) on a fabulous Spring evening.

Unsurprisingly, a sizeable number of them ventured into the Queen Elizabeth Hall’s Front Room for a free performance by non-Berliners Polar Bear. In fact I’d never realised until now that their leader Seb Rochford is a fellow Scot. I’ve seen them play live before but a) he, er, doesn’t exactly look Scottish (imagine walking down Sauchiehall Street with THAT hairdo) and b) his between-track utterances are a little on the quiet side. I was close enough to a speaker to pick up the accent tonight, even if I couldn’t actually see him from there – I’ve never seen the Front Room so busy. This small venue was transformed into a space about as intimate as Jack Tweed’s bedroom, with sweaty people squeezing themselves into every space they could find. And while I’ve never been entirely convinced by Polar Bear on record, tonight they played some of the more abstract (i.e. more interesting) pieces from their recent album for Leaf, Peepers. This meant the off kilter lurch of “Drunken Pharoah” and an extended version of “A New Morning Will Come” featuring a glorious swelling finale and great textural work from Leafcutter John. I’ve always thought that the more Leafcutter John there is on a Polar Bear track the better it tends to be, and he was prominent tonight, squeaking balloons in the first half and rocking out on guitar in the second.

And Vladislav Delay isn’t German either. Delay, aka Sasu Ripatti, hails from Finland, although did spend a number of years living in Berlin. His sound tonight was very German though. Stepping back from the excellent improv-jazz flavoured Tummaa album, he delivered a set that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the Kompakt label. Layers of deep, burbling bass and dreamy Wolfgang Voigt-style atmospherics were topped off with some trademark percussion, Delay hammering away on a variety of metal and plastic devices on the desk. This slightly more club-friendly approach wasn’t entirely suited to the all-seated QEH, but Delay was undeniably in fine form tonight, not least at the end of the set when he brought in some big clangy dub effects, shaking a microphone in something that sounded like a bag of marbles.

Ripatti’s partner Antye Greie (an actual, real German, although I assume she now lives in Finland too) took to the stage next for an intriguing collaboration with Gudrun Gut entitled “Construction Site”. They were certainly getting into the spirit, with their side of the stage decorated with hazard tape and ladders, while wearing hard hats. The music took some related sounds, metal-on-metal, sawing and banging, and refashioned them into techno-pop shapes. A film in the background showed diffuse monochrome images of structures and tools, while Greie and Gut muttered breathily about bridges and highways, about stones and sand, about cement and rubber boots (with none of the cut-up vocals which have distinguished recent Greie albums in her AGF guise). It meandered occasionally, and slipped into some formulaic patterns, but the harder, more industrial sections were pretty exciting, especially when they built to a crisp and crunchy techno climax. “Finish it!” said Greie, just as I was beginning to imagine the merits and demerits of a construction-themed Kraftwerk album.

To Rococo Rot’s recent album Speculation on Domino was somewhat unexpected, coming a full 6 years since their last studio album proper, yet showing that they have lost none of their elegant, propulsive touch. The fact that they played a fair bit of it wasn’t unwelcome, especially Robert Lippok’s reprisal of his motorik basslines on “Lazy”, and the excellent “Seele”. The latter seems a mere marimba away from being something from Tortoise’s TNT, before blossoming into a sprightly piece of minimal techno, Stefan Schneider’s electronic frameworks meshing with flawlessly teutonic rhythm section. The second half of the show was something very different. To Rococo Rot were joined on the QEH stage (as they were at Nick Cave’s Meltdown festival in 1999) by Faust’s Hans Joachim Irmler. Initially Irmler just added some gently ebbing and pulsing synths, before the sound engineers realised that it wasn’t supposed to sound like gently ebbing and pulsing synths. The effect of the running repairs was immediate: suddenly we were plunged deep into the epic intro to Faust’s “Krautrock”, with Irmler producing layer upon layer of dense electronic squall and static. As Irmler jammed his fist onto the keyboard over some repetitive two-note basslines, he even managed to recall another disciple of Stockhausen: at times this came close to capturing the essence of the 70s Miles Davis sound. To Rococo Rot’s modus operandus leaves so much empty space for Irmler’s textures, and boy did he fill them, ramming drones and concrete rumble into the closing piece before ending it with heaving industrial groans. Outside in the Front Room, Kompakt’s Thomas Fehlmann (pictured above) was providing further reminders of the current Berlin sound, but Irmler’s collaboration with To Rococo Rot was a reminder of just how astonishingly experimental and powerful some of Germany’s older musical forms still sound. VOTE FAUST.

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