Guido Möbius „Klisten“

David Stubbs | The Wire

„Earning his daily crust with Autopilot, who does publicity for Faust’s label Klangbad among others, Guido Möbius sidelines as a Techno DJ and solo artist whose sound gently defies definition. Klisten isn’t the sort of album that piledrives into your consciousness and pulverizes your sensibilities. Rather, it’s immensely idiosyncratic yet immensely likable, with Möbius’s facility for melody and warm tones deceiving you as to just what he’s smuggling through here. This is radical stuff but never ugly, abrupt or jarring.

Möbius prefers latticed combinations of acoustic instruments as a rule, with samplers and Moogs playing a modest, if crucial, supporting role. Opening track „Pick Nick“ is typical, its blippy claptrap opening soon deferring to an acoustic feast with synths buzzing around like wasps. „Nelles“ is similarly inoffensive yet subtle, the rhythmical ground shifting imperceptibly beneath your feet, a seamless metamorphosis occurring mid-song that doesn’t put you out of joint. „Kelt“ scurries gently about, a little legs and chomping munchkins until, as is Möbius’s won’t, he switches gear from the banal to the haunting. Similarly, „Omhoog“ starts out like the presenters of a 70s school music show going through their paces, all triangles and guitars, until the whiff of nostalgia is elevated into something altogether more Proustian.

„Nachtschicht“ is duskier and more disturbing, flutes intoning desolately and ominously like wooden wind chimes pealing in the middle of a forest, as Bettina Weber’s violin saws insistently through the Ambient fabric. Finally, „Wie es ist“, in which voices pipe up unnervingly for the only time on the album, a brief burst of Krautrock barbershop, then a momentous clamor of drums and violins not unlike Henry Cow, as a synth throbs radioactively in the midst of the mix.

There is little to be said for Klisten beyond celebrating its endless capacity to delight, confound and unsettle through its unlikely instrumentation and arrangements and a complex rhythmical sense. Its beauty is of the gracious, thing in itself variety. All of the more reason, strangely, to fall in love with it.