“Turn off the harddrive”

Jens Balzer | Bln Zeitung

The most beautiful sound record of this autumn comes from Berlin. You don’t necessarily believe it in the first few seconds, because during the first few seconds on this record it crackles and pops like from a broken computer hard disk, and if there’s anything you don’t want to hear on noise records anymore, it’s crackling – and pops that could come from broken computer hard disks – all the more so when the noise record comes from Berlin, the capital of crackling-cracking-broken-computer-hard-disk music. Stop it!, thinks the listener. Hard disk off!

And then it goes out, within seconds. First the crackling and popping is seconded by a guitar vibrato hanging heavy in the reverb loop, then the vibrato solidifies in a Steve Reich-like plucked minimal music; a modulator modulates spherically stretched ghost songs; from the back left a Jew’s harp oings and boinges its way in – and forms the beautiful warm wave movement into a song.

It’s like that throughout. There is so much happening on this record that you can hardly keep up with listening; and yet it seems audible and structured. Whatever noisy multiplicity unfolds, analogue and digital, electric and electronic noises, always form themselves (without anyone singing) into verses and songs. Guido Möbius, well known to local listeners as a one-man label operator, impresario and interesting noise DJ, recorded “Klisten” almost entirely on his own in his little butt in Friedrichshain. So it’s living room pop – but if living room pop has to continue somehow, with this typical post-turnaround Berlin pop sluffitum, then it has to be like this and nothing else: friendly, eccentric and tinkering; but also with the unconditional will to structure.

Guido Möbius is a minimalist, but he lacks that annoying Berlin minimalist inertia, that dawdling student-with-oven-heating-whimsicality that is so annoying about bands like Contriva. He comfortably stirs together everything he finds at the Friedrichshain noise flea markets, but his eyelids don’t droop to half past seven. Guido Möbius keeps his eyes wide open and his ears even wider; at the same time he never gets bogged down anywhere. Minimalism and fullness, reductiveness and pop do not even come into conflict with each other, because Möbius has understood the right minimalism as an effect of condensation. Hopefully he will no longer be alone in Berlin with this insight: “Klisten” is a groundbreaking work.