RHYTHM is neither pop nor avant-garde, but deals simply with the basic principles of any modern music: rhythm.
Frank Bretschneider takes his, never simple, but all the more heartfelt relationship to rhythm and it’s complexity, to an intense inventory and, this time, works less out of suspenseful abstract sounds, than out of grooves. The terseness and precision of previous works remains, as well as a preference for high-voltage sounds halfway between noise and tone. New is the assemblage of the material. A combination of programming, composition and construction, which draws a clear distinction to his preferred loop-based work on foregone albums, is connected with Bretschneider's very idiosyncratic aesthetic of digital sound: controlled and objective. The whole follows simple mechanical states: on/off, forward/backward, up/down, slow/fast, loud/quiet, dull/brilliant, soft/hard and is characterized by the absence of any romanticism. Still this return to the elementary, the fundamental, does not diminish the music to dance-floor functionality, instead Bretschneider always stays emphatically musical and manages to generate sophisticated and complex rhythm-structures, which respectively induce minimal deviations in frequency and timing relationships to generate a surplus of funk.
In all, RHYTHM is probably Bretschneider’s most direct, clear and concentrated work yet.
raster-noton r-n 082 | 2007
01. A SOFT THROBBING OF TIME
02. THE BIG BLACK AND WHITE GAME
03. WE CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE
04. THE EIGHT DAY PEOPLE
05. OTHER DAYS, OTHER EYES
06. CONSTRUCTION SHACK
07. THE MOON IS A HOLE IN THE SKY
08. ALL SUMMER IN A DAY
09. THE OCTOBER GAME
All music by Frank Bretschneider
Recorded in Berlin, June 2006 - March 2007.
Mastered by Andreas (Lupo) Lubich at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin
