RUBIN STEINER - Wunderbar Drei

Rubin Steiner’s Fred Landier hails from Tours, a little French town of the Loire Valley proud of its royal past and “douceur de vivre”. Until a few years ago, electronic music was virtually unknown to anyone there. Although an hour away from Paris by train, guitars and typical provincial pseudo punk attitude was all the music enthusiast would get. Landier played in a handful of local bands, the last one, Merz, even becoming quite famous in the region for a while. The story came to an end when all the members bought PCs and started composing each one on their own.
After a first extremely limited and now unavailable album and a few even rarer 12”, Landier eventually released Lo-Fi Nu Jazz Vol. 2 in 1999, a playful and undisciplined take on electronic jazz sitting somewhere between Dimitri From Paris’s excellent lounge bonanza Sacrebleu and, well, nothing really! The album received praises everywhere and now, the second Rubin Steiner opus, Wunderbar Drei, comes to confuse and please even more.
In a recent interview with French cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles, Landier confessed that Wunderbar Drei was a sort of accomplishment in regard to his current musical capacities. More focused and concise, the music of Rubin Steiner remains as energetic and chaotic as ever. Fueled with a love for distorted atmospheres, misfit influences and humoristic touches, this album pulses with grooves and clever ideas. Wunderbar Drei opens with Please Listen To This Record, an invitation to anyone listening to it on a listening post somewhere in a shop to go further than simply sampling the tracks presented here. At times ambitious (arduous references to deities of jazz – An Interlude For Charles Mingus, Some Strings For John Coltrane), at others desperately playful (Guitarlandia, Battle Of The Cave or Revox & Trompette, which features rejects of recordings sessions by no less than Elvis Presley) or simply respectful (New Bossa, Wunderland) Wunderbar Drei constantly changes direction, Landier voluntarily keeping listeners on their toes. Piling up influences and references in no particular order, inserting sexy interlude in between bigger chunks of semi-sensical turmoil, he manages to keep clear of the amateurish sound that made Lo-Fi Nu Jazz Vol. 2 at once charmful and too uneven. With this new album, he has mastered his technological environment, listened to what was going on around him, and went the opposite way.
Despite its jolly chaos, Wunderbar Drei doesn’t lack of direction, and if Fred Landier likes to move fast, he peacefully waits for his listeners to catch up before making the next move. This album proves to be violently happy, excruciatingly funny and simply perfect. Rubin Steiner, music definitely sounds better with you.