Nostalgia is a powerful feeling. Who doesn’t want to return to their
youth or doesn’t like to think about what they have achieved back in the
days. Also in music, there are bands that still exist but haven’t
produced anything new for years. However, they keep on touring satisfying
the audience’s desire to bring back days long gone. On the one hand,
that’s absolutely okay, but on the other hand such concepts represent
artistic stagnation. Of course, this idea of music hardly works in
improv and especially the German guitarist Olaf Rupp certainly can’t be
accused of suffering from nostalgia. “I don’t like to look back. Mostly
I prefer to dream about the future,” he says in the liner notes of his new
album.
Nevertheless, he has now released an almost two-hour long album with
music from the turn of the century. But in order to understand
Earth and More
one has to go back in history. At the time when the music published here
was created, Rupp’s band STOL (with Stephan Mathieu on drums and Rudi
Mahall on bass clarinet) had just disbanded and he began to focus more on
freely improvised music. However, in order to see in which direction he
wanted to go, he recorded and produced complete albums every month,
sometimes pieces with the acoustic guitar, the electric guitar or
electronics. Some were released, the rest became demo cdRs that were
distributed all over the world. Some made it to Liam Stefani in Glasgow.
The head of the Scatter label has kept them to this day. He was the one
who initiated the idea to publish some of them and Rupp actually thought
about his earlier music, listened to old tapes and “found a way to
overcome [his] nostalgia phobia”.
On Earth And More we listen to a musician who is strongly
fixated on electronics and for whom the guitar tends to take a back seat.
Pieces like “Lorraine Rain“ or the title track remind me of Aphex Twin
(without the drum’n’bass background), Throbbing Gristle, Test Department or
This Heat! “I did not have a computer at that time, so I recorded directly
onto cassette tapes and audio cdRs“, Rupp explains. “The setup was a
heavily abused Behringer mixer which I modified so that I could cascade and
feedback several channels. Then I had a few guitar effects: a looper, a
distortion pedal and a bass guitar synth-pedal.“ Another influence on this
music is techno. Whether the tracks are more ambient-like (“Makyō“) or
seem to be based on computer game sounds (“Mai Outtake“), Rupp seemed to
enjoy the purity of rhythm and sound.
Another surprise is the fact that he sings on two of the tracks. On
“Goodlook“, with his constantly looping chorus line, which becomes
increasingly alienated as the song progresses, he sounds a bit like Robert
Wyatt. On “Lonely Woman” he is reminiscent of an experimental Nick Drake,
who seems to have John Martyn as a second guitarist and who extends his
melancholy songs to infinity with ambient sounds.
Finally, the last two tracks – all in all 35 minutes long – are pure
ambient music. “Upstate 1 and 2” were created as music for an exhibition
by photo artist Gabriele Worgitzki. The music is functional and very
spatial, with loops that work like a beat. Both tracks are wonderful,
especially “Part 1” with its echoes of music of the spheres and the
sparse guitar arpeggios even gives the piece a psychedelic touch. Bands
like Autechre and Boards of Canada come to mind.
The result of this journey into his artistic self was Rupp’s turn to
improvised music. Life Science, his first album on FMP, was
released in the summer of 1999. Nevertheless, it would have been exciting
to see in which direction the electronic musician Rupp would have
developed.
Although it is unusual music for our blog, for me it’s one of this
year’s most interesting releases so far.
Earth And More is available as a download. You can listen to it
here: