Album Review: black midi – Schlagenheim


Schlagenheim 2




Three thousand years BC, when our ancestors and their ancestors were creating the first thing that would be called music, it will have frightened and exhilarated those lucky enough to listen to it.

We have always, it seems, wanted to hear sounds other than those we make ourselves. Throughout the course of history since innovations have continued to push it, both as an art form and a recreation, forward, right up until the last twenty years or so when progress slowed to a trickle.

Maybe this is a result of the phenomenon of Retromania which author Simon Reynolds posits in his book of the same name, or it’s a side effect of the tightening cultural grip of Hauntology, in which the past is safe and the future dangerously uncertain. Either way, black midi are trying to drag us kicking and screaming into a new century by confrontation, acknowledging their work as a spatter of paint on a canvas, a unique Nano-moment of giant evolution.

Schlagenheim is their debut album, largely recorded in the space of just five days and assembled from jam phrases which stuck rather than things that necessarily made sense or sounded relational. The result is breathtaking as jazz, white noise, post-rock, hardcore and no-wave all bullet in and out of focus, with singer Geordie Greep on occasion splitting the difference between David Byrne and Jello Biafra.

First things first: your Uncle is going to really, really hate this. Opener 953 surges through quiet-loud phases, weird time signatures and chaotic, scraping instrumentation, the sort of head-spinning blast designed to make a statement within a statement. It seems almost churlish to describe the quartet’s approach to composition as Avant Garde, but there’s no more appropriate phrase to describe bmbmbm, on which Greep feels like he’s struggling to free himself from a straitjacket, whilst the closing two minutes are as alien and indescribable as having someone else’s imagination being plugged directly into your own must feel.

It would be wrong, however, to label Schlagenheim as some kind of hipster in-joke or highly calculated war of attrition. On Western the hyper-speed country and freight train beats are glorious, huge mountains of bugged out energy and glowing heat. Greep has claimed that in a couple of years the band’s output will sound nothing like it does today, but it would surely be worth hearing how the tumbling rhythms of Speedway and Reggae’s controlled mania are reincarnated in future material.

Amidst all the arguments this album will inevitably stir up, there’s more than a kernel here of young genius at work. Schlagenheim may eventually shred the tense, dry as hell funk which it begins with, but the ultimate blasts are one of a rare precision. Closer Ducter is by contrast a journey, a story made up from foreboding, tension and crescendo, poetry and science torn to pieces in a frenetic, disorientating finish that defies description.

It’s easy to say that this ending feels like the screech of madness, but underneath it all black midi are in control, as if happy to pay the price if their walk along the tightrope is one that frees a hundred others. Many will have howled at those first primordial sounds thousands of years ago, as they might from Schlagenheim’s naked provocation.

Forget the past, this is a soundtrack to something massive that hasn’t happened yet.



7/10

(Andy Peterson)


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