After over two years of intense touring and various
projects, including a remix for Depeche Mode no less,
Cologne-born and based Jo Zimmermann returns with his
fifth proper album as Schlammpeitziger, a named borrowed
from a species of fish which has the singular particularity
of being able to breathe through its mouth and rear.
Follow up to the collection of unreleased tracks Collected
Simplesongs Of My Temporary Past, released
on Domino in 2001, this new album sees Zimmermann moving
from A Musik to Sonig, the label founded by Mouse
On Mars’ Andi Toma and Jan St Werner, and
home of St Werner’s and Oval mastermind Markus
Popp’s Microstoria collaborative project.
Constantly taking the particularity of endless word
in the German language to the extreme, Zimmermann has
become somewhat of an expert at assembling extremely
long words into even longer, mostly meaningless titles,
and Everything Without All Inclusive is no
exception. This playful approach to his native language
is symptomatic of his attitude to music. If he usually
keeps his compositions between three and five minutes
long, his conception of electronic music is fuelled
with fun melodies and cheesy sounds. Described in the
press release as ‘a master of the Casio’,
Zimmermann astonishingly goes against the majority of
his contemporaries to develop his own brand of lo-fi
electronica. Taking the frenetic elements of his live
performances onto record more than ever, Zimmermann
crams an incredible amount of ideas on Everything
Without All Inclusive, with each track having its
own flavour, yet equally appearing as just one clog
in a much bigger mechanism. The album opens with the
humming buzz of a flying insect that Zimmermann then
imitates with a typical analogue wave. Slowly bringing
the rhythmic pattern and melody in, he then builds Behäbige
Alarmschwarmlage layer after layer, eventually
bringing the whole thing together and animating it to
the delight of the listener. This technique is characteristic
of this album, yet the process seems to be altered slightly
with each new track, demonstrating the man’s mature
attitude to his sonic environment. Zimmermann constant
shift between complexity and beauty reveals some precious
moments here, as on the delicate and melancholic Im
Reaglänzgasboot, which evokes the work of
the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in a suprising way, or
the ludic Aufstand Des Neo-Flötisten,
which twists a pseudo-flute sound into something strange
and absorbing. The point about Schlammpeitziger’s
music is that however disconnected from the reality
of modern electronic music it gets, his approach is
far from being totally incongruous. Zimmermann avoids
loosing the plot by retaining the musical quality of
his music, constantly exposing it under different lights
and exploring its many aspects. As before, Zimmermann
balances the abstract components of his compositions
by introducing clever little melodic elements, calling
on pop comparisons more than on anything purely electronic.
Schlammpeitziger is a true oddity, and a fascinating
one at that. With an uncanny ability to produce apparently
simple music and a perverse vision for oblique sonic
constructions, Jo Zimmermann presents with this fifth
album his most accomplished work to date.
4.7/5 |
