Flim - The alchemist of indietronica

Enrico Wuttke is a little elf, lost and solitary.

Born in 1971 in Mühlhausen, Germany, Enrico was already playing piano at the age of 7. He went on to study the finer arts, until the completion of his first work, on a privately produced cassette, recorded in his own home.

As the years passed, in 2001 he managed to get in touch with Tomlab: it was the start of a collaboration that led to his first two albums.

A disorienting debut with Given You Nothing (2003).

An intriguing hybrid between a glitch-tilted Rachel's and a less cerebral Matmos. The result is a handful of songs that taste of both tradition and innovation at once. From the piano score corroded by the haunting drone of "Hell" to the glitch, organ and every kind of acoustic suite that is "Linker2".

"April" saturates the ears with a jumble of analog sounds. "My Czesko Guitar" is jaw-dropping in its carefree, playful swagger. It feels like listening to a bunch of slightly psychedelic kids playing on a lawn on some alienating planet.

It defies definition. It would be extremely reductive and wrong to pigeonhole this work into any particular strand. It's up to us to discover it and be enchanted by it.

Barely a year goes by and we already have the follow-up, Helio (2004). Ambient-pop for a playful little bedroom. A soundtrack for a sunny, sugary day. Sketches of granite-like fragility. A fine smoothie blending in equal parts: Fridge, Mùm, Piano Magic, Bola, The Blood Group. Shake it all up well and you'll get the cocktail of your autumn days. A string of minimal vignettes of crystalline beauty. Effervescent compositional imagination, a shimmering skip in its rhythm.

"How I Trashed My Knees" enchants with its accordion loop, scattered errors streak an already halting gait, an alien-sounding synth tears apart and stitches back together. A piano, in the background, dishes out random, aleatory notes, completely detached from everything else.

A haunting bouncing of notes. Timbres suspended in mid-air. Fake percussion. Minimal keyboard lines. A dark, jagged atmosphere. That's "Little Rodachè". Another sparkling gem is "Conversation", built on a sickly repetition and a handful of synth-etic phrasings.

"Chime" is a masterpiece. A sonic evolution beyond any boundary of definition. From sly calm to marching rhythms. Organ, glitch, percussion, noise. A centrifuge of counterpoints. Spatial catastrophe. A little suite in "Is That Me?". A xylophone embroiders sinuous, winding patterns in soft colors, a stringed instrument adorns it with pachydermal calm. We move from the melancholic harmonica drone of "New Living" to the Mùm-style indie-glitch-pop of the title track. Precious, moving minutes go by with the tender "Snow Behind", before letting go into the lively "For Fred".

Helio is an album for shy, lovestruck souls.

In 2004 Flim produces a track for Mark Robinson, on the album "Babe Rainbow", titled "Stuttgart Please Please", a moderate down-tempo number with synth-pop leanings.

Fleeting appearances follow on two compilations: the first, titled "Fork Ends" on Audio Dregs, with the track "Donkey Trains" (metallic lapping and a limping gait); the second, titled "Many Things Worth Living For", with the composition "Meet Me In C#", confirms his overflowing compositional flair.

We land in 2005, and a gem called Holiday Diary falls from the sky. A diary of a solitary, harrowing holiday. The same playful, carefree, rambling spirit as ever. Tiny, childlike scores for small, secluded days. A sweet, gentle digital flavor, as delicate as a freshly bloomed flower, soaked in flavorful dew.

"Murmur Room" is the same acoustic guitar chord repeating itself, a backdrop of delicate frothy synths, booming little noises, microscopic touches of some mysterious instrument. Sonic abstractions for winged sprites, drawn in dazzling colors, tasty flavors. "Lime" is a limping sketch into which flows a withdrawn spirit, tormented by rough, irregular, drawn-out timbres. The piano paints a dark sky, various acoustic instruments add detail, with a cyclical repetition of small flashes of disturbing power. Hints of noise, gentle relaxing pauses, the sprawl of a boundless landscape.

"Current Description" is a proto-ambient piece, streaked with noisy disturbances, sinuous, winding drones, slithering and slippery, schizophrenic and elusive. Peace and dreamlike pathos. Random notes for dark rooms.

"Above Seagullis" takes a more rhythmic approach. A percussive whirlwind is steady and precious, fluttering counterpoints of harmonica, synth, piano, electro(sonic) spasms as tiny as an atom. A sonic carpet for solitary moments, in front of a fire, music to be jealously kept to oneself.

"Home" is a masterpiece. Seemingly a simple piano scale, it hides genius in its corners. The piano's sonic tail is looped, creating a disorienting effect, in which the tonal scales collide with the obsessive effects of a machine engineered to destabilize. Beautiful to the point of pain. "No Guitar Please" is a thrilling little game. A harmonica played atop a boundless mountain, counterpoints of a skipping accordion, pauses that render the surrounding space static. Smiles and love. Sighs and heartbeats. A slightly cloudy day, a meadow soaked by a forgotten rain, a group of arcane beings surrendering to silence. An orgy of sprawling, relaxing sounds.

"Ecstatic Brown" is the logical conclusion of (yet) another sparkling work.

Winds of an unknown world, tangible touches of a demon gone mad, a tailed instrument often leaving precise chimes, the flow is slow and prolonged, and gradually everything dissolves into a sea of sweetness.

Shortly after this one's release, our tireless little indie-tronic gnome records another album, Simple Pleasures (2005). And once again it's a mystical magic enveloping our minds.

"Hell 3" is a journey through endless spaces, with no limit to its exploration. "Hard Boiling Paradise" revisits certain past atmospheres, spinning together carefree imagination, genius and nerve. "In Schlingen" bewitches, captures, seizes without restraint, "Bless You Kid" is a track perfect for a Morr Music compilation, "A Mental State" is an oblivion of dazzling colors. "Lantin 11" closes things out in the continuous unraveling of a booming sound.

Across his four albums as a whole, he has managed to create an almost unprecedented hybrid of classical sensibility and digital influences — an incredible ability to blend a love of traditional sounds with an innate curiosity for new technologies.

Over the course of 2006, no fewer than two titles were released featuring Flim as a collaborator.

The stylistic coordinates outlined previously are now set aside in favour of a more essential sonic chiselling, built from a handful of piano or keyboard sounds and pared down by an ambient approach that draws breath from the most abstract Satie to the most atmospheric Brian Eno. A sad, solitary music, killed by an event that only his own words can explain: "How can one come to terms with the reality of losing a child? There are moments in life when words can do nothing for us, and we seek comfort elsewhere. We can find, outside or inside ourselves, sounds and images so powerful they can transcend death and despair. To avoid appearing pathetic, we must find the right balance between hope and frustration".

From this account one can grasp the essence of his last two records, deeply steeped in melancholy and hope, at once capable of enchanting us and making us understand that the future isn't so bleak after all.

If Pola Music comes across as extremely fragmentary and at times almost amateurish (though "Picture 7" is exhilarating), Ohne Titel 1916 is a collection of thunderous watercolours that seem like fragments of blurred memories, small sketches drawn by hand and gone over again with the liquid of tears.

"Noch Haesslich" scatters random piano notes that seem like drops of suffering, while "Sirenen" stands out amid soft electronic sounds and bursts of atmosphere.

And while "Warum Darum" approaches silence with great tact, the docile metallic sounds of "Schellenengel" sit halfway between the old indietronic habits and the new direction being pursued.

The rest of the record gives shape to sadness with a starry painting ("Ploeztilich Starr"), banishing fears and instilling confidence with a closing pair of crystalline compositions: "Noch Weiblich" and "Organ Orange". Xylophones and piano in the first piece, only organ, as the title suggests, in the second (superb) passage.

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