Bohren & der Club of Gore - Doom-jazz dances at the end of the night

And now I feel it coming back over me. It's like the sadness of a dog.

(“La Notte”, M. Antonioni)

Pausing for a moment to consider why, the underlying reason behind the abundance of literary, cinematic and mythological treatment of the never-fully-resolved relationship between man and night, it isn't hard to pinpoint its subtle, intangible cause. The falling away of masks and daytime performances. The illusion of finally being able to set the imagined self free. The psychosis that creeps into the picture, reminding us just how much we're at the mercy of its dictates. The cruel joke of a feeling of understanding that looks suspiciously like it's masking the features of pity. The sweetener of a romanticism that's quiet yet black with presences, or (more often) unjustifiable absences. The anguish.

It's impossible to confine its value to the arbitrariness of a timeline. Demanding and seductive at once, the attempt to give some kind of artistic expression to this circus of deeply human perceptions.

Bohren & der Club Of Gore is probably the experiment that has come closest to pulling it off, forging a musical language that isn't exhausted by its acoustic qualities but instead pins down a very specific state of mind. Mimetic, anti-descriptive.

A brief overview of the Bohren saga, between ambient, doom-jazz and noir existentialism.

The first steps

The tape begins to unspool in 1988: one could hardly imagine a more anonymous backdrop than Mülheim an der Ruhr to frame the start of an adventure, yet it's precisely here, in the heart of Germany's industrial basin, not far from that Düsseldorf which gave birth to Kraftwerk and Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, that four longtime friends take their first steps together in music. It's an idyll that takes on dark, fascinatingly jagged contours right from the start: having met at school, drummer Thorsten Benning, bassist Robin Rodenberg, guitarist Reiner Henseleit and pianist Morten Gass, sharing a passion for the most extreme fringes of metal (from grindcore through to doom-metal), decide to join forces in a project that would not only indulge these urges, but give them new life, strengthening their message by steering it toward different coordinates. It will, however, take a full four years from that first moment before an actual record emerges. The seed, though, had already been planted.

Meanwhile, it's a period of parallel commitments for the future band's members. With Henseleit lending his voice to fellow townsmen Chronical Diarrhoea, a thrash-metal outfit good for a full two LPs straddling the late Eighties and the very start of the following decade, and the remaining comrades reuniting under the name 7 Inch Boots, devoted to a massive lo-fi hardcore with doom leanings, each of them ended up thoroughly exploring their youthful urges, honing their musical instincts, still in a "primitive" way and with limited means, in a whirlwind of violent, irreverent creativity. These would prove to be formative experiences, far from minor detours, within the scope of a journey unique in its kind. Determined to find their own expressive niche, to transcend the references and fascinations of a lifetime through a stylistic vehicle of deliberately broader and more personal scope, the four, finally gathering in earnest as a unified outfit under the name Bohren (a word that translates into Italian as the rather onomatopoeic "drilling"), begin to familiarize themselves with a formula of different impact and purpose, though still well rooted in the extreme affairs of previous years. And so the game begins.

It doesn't take the four long to set to work on their first record: with a name change that leads them to the definitive Bohren & Der Club Of Gore (in honor of Gore, an instrumental noise trio from the Netherlands that inspired their mission), by 1993 the time has already come for their first cassette demo, the first calling card with which to finally open up to the world. Unfortunately unavailable now, but with contents easy enough to guess, Luder, Samba und Tavernen prefigures, right from its title ("carcasses, samba and taverns"), that morbidness poised between the sensual and the fatal, those pairings of macabre fascination, that strategy of visual tension juxtaposing semantic categories of disparate nature within a unified frame. The stuff of hazy noir settings, in fact. And it's precisely within this vein, this deliberately and strongly cinematic current, that the B&DCOG sound takes shape.

A sound that already blossoms and finds appreciation in the trio of releases put out in 1994, under various titles and for different purposes. Already the first EP, bluntly titled Bohren Und Der Club Of Gore, a seven-inch released by an obscure sublabel of the equally obscure Suggestion Records, takes care to illustrate the project's qualities. A sepia cover, a cut straight out of a 1940s poster, and you're ready to immerse yourself in saturated guitars, a bass with abyssal vibrations, drums marking each beat with measured slowness.

Just another low-profile doom band? Not quite. Even though the rather poor production and the grainy sound might recall the plethora of contemporary acts perpetually exploring the filthiest, most degrading recesses of human damnation, what emerges here isn't the perspective of an insider to the scene, but of someone exploiting its features to build a language of significantly different import. And while it was still really too early to say so outright, the seed of jazz awareness was already lurking nearby. Moving beyond the Earth-area drone-doom of "Paternoster" - an intriguing exercise, but all things considered too boxed into its own setup - what stands out are the guitar and bass interplay of "Die Nahtanznummer, Teil 1" and of the closing "13 Zähne für Toni D.". A constant that recurs later too, in that surprisingly creative year, a magmatic bubbling in which elementary (though never trivial) bass phrasing finds its counterpart in ragged guitar figures, still partaking of that same Eighties metal tension, but with a new drive, a disturbing, almost enveloping edge, if words can even dare capture it, with all the power that distinguishes the sound. Even without knowing the full content of that demo tape, it isn't hard to work it out, if only by simple deduction.

Seedy noir-soaked motels

On the path toward a gradual shedding of the murky heavy cloak, the first full-length by Bohren & Der Club Of Gore, tellingly titled Gore Motel, arrives right on schedule the same year as the EP, burning through the stages toward complete emancipation, toward the long-desired personal voice, even faster still. And those faint outside intrusions, those small cracks in the granite, become gradually more evident, breaking its homogeneity in an admirable play of geometries. The lineup presenting itself to claim its space under the Epistrophy label has already made considerable strides forward, has already carved deeply into the tough hide of its own art. Across the 74 minutes of a debut that almost has the feel of a manifesto, the process continues unabated.

Not so much a softening as a redefinition of their own positions, the twelve included tracks, often divided more for convenience than out of genuine narrative necessity, stand out as little caskets of atmosphere, jagged tales of nocturnal poetry, transfigured into a dark noir pulse. With the bass in a prominent position, drum interventions marking a nonexistent rhythm, and, for the first time, the entrance of hazy synth and keyboard beds (especially in the second half of the record), Gore Motel is a hypothetical soundtrack set among desolate streets in the dead of night, amid sinister omens slashing the darkness like blades, and an inner anxiety for which there seems to be no remedy. The cover portrays a vintage Bruce Lee (to whom, curiously, a belated release under the name 7 Inch Boots would be dedicated two years later), but the record's ideal setting would have favored an altogether different scenery.

Colors saturated beyond belief, slow and calculated movements, chiaroscuro in perpetual blur: the album's ambience (a term used quite deliberately: with a little imagination, one could really picture dark dark-ambient explorations), mysterious and oppressive, truly lacks only the support of a film to close the circle. And perhaps it's for this very reason that the quartet's minimalist scores, with Henseleit's guitar taking on a decidedly more restrained role, still don't seem to possess real thematic autonomy, almost seeming to cry out loud for the aid of images. Already many of the titles ("Dangerflirt mit der Schlägerbitch", "Daddys lungern durch die Nicht", "Der Maggot Tango", to give a few examples) point to this desire, betraying a craving for an imagery of thugs and dolls immersed in the murky cloak of a decaying metropolis. However excellently played, with a truly remarkable forward production push, the music of Bohren & Der Club Of Gore is still defenseless before its own concepts, letting itself be submerged without putting up much resistance, in an all-too-predictable exchange of references. The goal, in any case, would have been within reach in a very short time.

Radio abandonments for lone spirits

Just the chance to indulge in another bass-and-guitar ride of theirs on Schwarzer Sabbat für Dean Martin (any reference to past celebrities in a pulp vein is purely intentional), a split alongside the dark-ambient project Wald, and already the following year, every possible speculation about the quartet's future is literally swept away. Setting aside the imperfections of a debut certainly worth noting, yet still all too susceptible to the influence of an artistic vocabulary well codified in its main building blocks, the leap forward made with Midnight Radio is nothing short of staggering, the quantum leap that, in part, you'd expect from a group now perfectly seasoned, bolstered by a deadly rapport. A leap whose proportions exceed even the rosiest expectations: no longer the copious magma flows of the early days, nor even the hazy darkness of the first album—what surfaces across the two hours and twenty-three minutes of a double album of colossal sensations is extreme rarefaction, a work of subtraction elevated to state of the art, the praise of slowness in its purest form. Divided into eleven sprawling chapters, even more irrelevant from a narrative standpoint (with the exception of the last one, built on a sinuous percussive bed reminiscent of Sade 's "Smooth Operator"), the band's sophomore effort is once again a work in which text and context penetrate each other, a thematic and stylistic dialogue that nonetheless never collapses into conflict, into a state of imbalance. The conceptual subservience of Gore Motel has here been entirely dissolved: now it's B&DCOG themselves who suggest their own scenarios of action, who circumscribe, in the manner of peak Brian Eno, the radius within which to move their investigation. An investigation that here embraces desolate outskirts, while it's the dead of night and the surrounding silence reigns absolute. There is no longer any condemnation, any feeling of oppression: the bass, repeatedly crossing over into pure drone, sketches fleeting impressions, an elusive murmur that nonetheless clearly supports weary wanderings through empty streets.

With the drums, hazy and reticent, now marking out measures bordering on the infinite, and a guitar taking on almost the guise of a keyboard in the micro-melodic phrases dotting the whole double album, Midnight Radio is, however, not merely a masterpiece of atmosphere, nor does it settle for cheap descriptiveness. What winds through it, insistent yet discreet, is a strong psychological characterization, an introspective vein that reworks external stimuli and solitudes and returns a different profile, utterly transfigured in essence. It is ambient music, yes, but of an ambience that doesn't forget the vastness of the soul, that makes plain its imaginative charge: the extremely slow passages, the downright catatonic languor of the instruments, a certain sleepwalking quality in Morten Gass's measured yet meticulous keyboard contributions, describe the ideal itinerary for solitary abandon, sleepless escapes in search of the most complete evasion, through spaces in a state of apparent death. But their tireless search would lead them to rewind the thread, to uncover the fatal enchantments of dusk….

Fatal encounters as evening falls

Having by now reached total mastery of their distinctive ambient language — worlds apart, in any case, from the contemporary explorations into the recesses of darkness pursued by fellow countrymen Inade and Maeror Tri — Bohren had by this point little left to prove. Their creative drive, aimed at the progressive rarefaction and stripping-down of sound, of the basic make-up of rock music, had already been pushed to its fullest potential within that field; repeating the same forms would only have ended up curbing the impulse toward continual refinement, toward an evolution that was still far from exhausted.

It would take a full five years for the fruit of this thirst for evolution to be made public. Five years in which the band's line-up underwent apparently small, but in fact profound, changes. In 1996, Reiner Henseleit decided to leave the group: with him went not just one member of the band, but the guitar itself, for good — those doomy, grainy chords that had largely accounted for the group's initial "notoriety". The remaining comrades-in-arms were not remotely discouraged; indeed, they didn't even try to replace him with a newcomer who might carry on his role. Perhaps intimately aware that the band's instrumental vocabulary needed a new jolt, or perhaps simply wishing to respectfully close the book on the germinal phase of their career, the man who joined Bohren's ranks on a permanent basis in 1997 was Christoph Clöser, a composer and multi-instrumentalist based in Cologne, versatile on both piano and saxophone. Far more than the first instrument, which had been present since the quintet's earliest days, it was the second that caught the interest of the Mülheim crew, convincing them of the value of such an addition. A choice that would prove decisive: the nods to jazz had always been in the air, their aromas lingering there, distant but clearly perceptible, perhaps in a brushed drum pattern, perhaps beneath the dark outlines of bass and guitar. They were there regardless, ever-present, precious nuances hinting at vaster scenarios, unease in which to lose oneself, sink down and never return.

With the entry of the jazz instrument par excellence into the line-up, those nods become far more than mere allusions — they start chafing to claim their own space. From here on, all that was needed was to go along with those same impulses.

And it is at the dawn of the new millennium, in a climate already looking toward other horizons, that Sunset Mission finally sees the light of day. The cover presents the same dark tones, those blacks juxtaposed with more violent (if muted) bursts of red and yellow, as the previous records: yet the twist given to the iconographic context is evident, tangible. The scene has shifted to an earlier moment — the deserted avenues at midnight are still animated by some lone presence, some passing car headed who knows where. And that rift in the clouds, above blurred lights at dusk, filling with sinister omens: once again, an artistic humus perfectly suited to the quintet, but there is a new protagonist narrating its deeds. A tragic, moving, at times even decadent protagonist, pairing perfectly with the alluring keyboard textures that are the record's true trademark. Henseleit's chords are no longer there to disturb the overall picture, but the new line-up holds its own against the original creed, indeed redefining it in terms of intensity and lyricism, letting it flow into evocative, Badalamenti-esque visions. A comparison, that with the author of the soundtrack to "Twin Peaks", that would be used often from then on, especially by those keen to dismiss the German quintet's work hastily and without further words: and yet, like it or not, the parallel is tangible, a thin red thread indissolubly links the two experiences, beyond the individual personalities animating the two different paths. Certainly there is no extraordinary voice like Julee Cruise's to comment on Bohren's seductive nocturnal flights, nor that superb strategy of tension enacted by the American composer (which is more than enough reason to tell the two acts apart without argument), but the expressive vocabulary also shows notable points of contact: similar, in fact, are the ties to the noir tradition (more evident than ever on Sunset Mission), similar the minimal modulations in the composition, similar too is the emotional trajectory, torn between subtle dreaminess and tremulous concreteness. What the Germans lack, however, is the slippery unpredictability of David Lynch's right-hand man, the genuinely (not just hypothetically) cinematic openings of those pieces: against a band that took its first steps right within the realm of the soundtrack, more or less deconstructed, stands a group that, for its part, has known how to rework imagery and vistas to suit its own needs, but has never enjoyed real visual support to let one appreciate its actual cinematic stature.

Not that the band really needs it: in their umpteenth, vibrant sonic flow, Rodenberg and co. stitch together their own personal interpretation of music for a film that was never shot, but whose images it is always fascinating to try to decipher: long, extended tracking shots, murky shadows invading the scene, languid characters, almost annihilated by their own passions, and that saxophone, dictating the most dramatic moments, the ones of greatest emotional pull in the picture. No longer underpinned by the founding contribution of the bass, here relegated to mere accompaniment — but what accompaniment! — structurally speaking, the record's various movements travel over nebulae of keyboard and piano, the ideal bed for the funereal, dense resonance of the sax.

The ambient perfection of Midnight Radio consolidates into a prodigious crossover of overwhelming sensations: the era of dark-jazz (or doom-jazz, call it what you will) had thus begun.

Transcendent black

Welcomed with broad approval from specialist niches, yes, but also quite varied ones (from dark and jazz territories all the way to the more typically alternative crowd), the new "Bohren" recipe, the collection of noir imagery and crepuscular echoes of Sunset Mission, would however soon move on to entirely different levels.

This time only two years would pass before Black Earth recalibrated the aim once again: the shifts in form were, in truth, noticeable, and the difference between the fields of inquiry substantial. This time the cover turns black too, a shroud that lets only the sketch, the ghost of a skull, show through — a device that, together with the font, makes for a curious and jarring nod to certain low-grade metal. What remains intact from Sunset Mission is the sensual gait and the basic ingredients, used this time with extreme restraint, while Morten Gass's Fender Rhodes rises to the role of prima donna, contributing heavily to the vague "blues" mood that runs through the album.

Black Earth operates on a deeply mental plane; there's a stench of annihilation about it, a void of betrayed hopes, a dance that is lugubrious yet achingly sweet, heading toward one final catharsis, toward an irreversible sunset of soul and meaning.

The opening trio of tracks has all the appearance of a progressive, inexorable descent into a kind of metaphysical darkness, opening with the decadent lyricism of "Midnight Black Earth", slowing the pace on a funereal Rhodes-and-snare duet, and arriving at tones black to the point of perversion with "Maximum Black", dragged along on wisps of spirits, a handful of piano notes repeated obsessively, and a saxophone commentary like some hidden remnant of a form of humanity. What follows is a groping advance through the most absolute gloom (Benning's percussion here successfully conveys the sense of illusory movement); the feeling of emptiness is pervasive yet only apparent, the space teems with dense emotions that are nonetheless concealed and stripped of any image.

Only the intensely moving ballad "Destroying Angels" and the unbearable, swollen melancholy of "Constant Fear" manage, for a moment, to dilute this mute anguish, releasing through superb melodies the record's only clearly defined emotions, quivering with suggestion in every single breath, before sinking back into the darkness and dying away in the dark, long, Badalamenti-esque thriller of "The Art Of Coffins": as befits a record like Black Earth, an ending with no twist, one last, exhausted burning-out on the way to ultimate dissolution.

A record of rare psychic intensity, Black Earth embraces several conscious and unconscious levels, offering itself as an elegant noir backdrop, a companion to neurosis and alienation, a journey through an earthly hell populated by humanoid beings wearily searching for understanding and (self-)definition.

Never did nihilistic ruin have a more refined soundtrack.

Faustian serenades

Having perfected and reshaped such an effective formula, the "Bohren" are nevertheless not the kind of people to simply ride the wave, and after a two-year silence that would from then on become ritual, they returned in 2005 with Geisterfaust, another more or less extended work (just under sixty minutes) that enriches the ensemble with tuba and vibraphone.

Spread across five suites dedicated to the five fingers of the hand, Geisterfaust pushes the compositional program of Black Earth to even further extremes: the pace becomes slow to the point of catalepsy, the few melodies are the sole responsibility of the vibraphone, while Clöser's keyboards are reduced to a purely rhythmic function alongside Benning's sparse percussion. The atmosphere is austere and claustrophobic, every emotion frozen solid. And yet what one misses most this time is communicative potential, the grotesque undercurrent lying beneath every previous production by the collective. However flawless and far from lacking in evocative ideas, Geisterfaust gives everything away on the surface, earning admiration for its form but failing to establish any real connection, whether empathetic or imaginative. Despite the loftiest ambitions, in other words, the result of Geisterfaust doesn't go beyond business as usual for the immense capabilities of the B&DCOG outfit.

After another instrumental reshuffle, this time a necessary one, the band resurfaced to recalibrate their aim in 2008 with the successful Dolores. The Bohren sound had never been so full-bodied: alongside the now well-established base setup (Rhodes, vibraphone, bass, percussion), two saxophones (tenor and baritone) enter the fray, along with synthesizer and even a vocoder.

Dolores presents itself as a noticeably more relaxed flow – though certainly no brighter – that once again invests in the more cinematic side of the band's sound. Yet it took only a slight shift of a few decimal points to cast an entirely new light on the band: from a crossover collective, the Bohren seem to have completed their transformation into a jazz ensemble pure and simple. Listening to a track like "Karin", the association with a darker version of the Modern Jazz Quartet comes almost naturally, the renewed blues vein leads to the vibrant, genuine emotion of "Unkerich", while the sax monologue of "Still Am Tresen" would fit splendidly within the mournful romanticism of Tom Waits's "Alice".

The typical catatonic pace of the brushes, the black ambient backdrop populated by who knows what presences, the all-Fender-Rhodes elegance, once again safeguard the outfit's identity, with "Welten" standing as the ideal definitive manifesto of the band's new course.

Two years later, the appointment with the Bohren saga is renewed by Beileid, a three-track mini-album notable for the sinuous ballad "Zombies Never Die" and especially for the surprising "Catch My Heart": an unlikely but thoroughly successful cover of the Warlock heavy-metal track of the same name, featuring the band's first-ever vocal contribution, no less with a top-tier performer such as Mike Patton. A small, precious primer of dark vocal jazz for three-a.m. soliloquies.

An unsettling maturity

Despite these new, galvanizing forays into territories hitherto unexplored by the Teutons, the long-awaited seventh LP remains faithful to the band's tried-and-tested formal framework: funereal ballads for nocturnal alienation, a stern soundtrack for retro films, a melancholy commentary on rain-soaked cities. And yet, while in some respects Piano Nights undoubtedly presents itself as "the usual" B&DCOG record, the difference in character is nonetheless immediately apparent, more precisely an unprecedented lightness to the compositions, a graceful, pensive unfolding through vibraphone phrases and solitary sax asides. More than oppression, the key word here is inspiration.

Were one forced to pick one or more tracks from the batch, the choice would probably fall on the sprawling, deeply profound "Ganz leise kommt die Nacht", the introverted blues of "Unrasiert", and the long requiem of "Verloren" – performances that have little or nothing to envy in the collective's finest historical episodes.

If it's true, then, that Piano Nights doesn't overturn the quartet's established model, it would be difficult, not to say unfair, to dismiss the record as a tired photocopy of any of their previous releases, a temptation justifiable only through a distracted and prejudiced listen.

The noir vocation of Gass and co. has found the perfect dimension in which to let images and feelings flow freely, with all the craftsmanship of the trade but none of the vanity of art for art's sake.

The latest demonstration of the class that has always accompanied the project arrives at the dawn of the 2020s, after a six-year recording hiatus, with Patchouli Blue, a record that paints the picture of a band solid in its intentions, for whom time, or even the very makeup of its lineup, seem to be relative concepts. Without the contribution of drummer and co-founder Thorsten Benning (who left the band in the meantime, in 2015), the remaining three have lost none of their hazy atmospheric impact, making up for the rhythm section with superb class and reinforcing, even more than might have been expected, the evocative tone of the compositions.

With almost any sense of rhythmic scansion stripped away (save for occasional synth interventions marking time), the album flows glacial and ominous, subjugating tension within a web of menacing synthetic velvets and sinuous saxophone commentary, open to a melodicism that almost justifies its division into eleven tracks. In this respect, the sonic blend once again reckons with the redemption-less annihilation of Black Earth, but accentuates its pathetic tones by translating them into an icy sensuality, which Christoph Clöser's tenor sax conditions with morbid relish. The overall tone heightens a sense of nervousness that even in more "classically" jazz ballads like "Sollen es doch alle wissen" never fully dissipates. Between the waltzing moods of "Verwirrung am Strand", the destabilizing dimension of the title track, where the noir edge is sharpened by its tremulous guitar work, and the psychedelic hints of "Zwei Herzen aus Gold" (with its striking, evocative Rhodes touches), the trio's artistry rediscovers a spark of intensity that had been at risk of losing momentum.

Architects of a world of rare evocative consistency, Bohren & Der Club Of Gore continue to pen the impossible soundtracks of a world on the brink of collapse, wrapping it in a disturbing voluptuousness. More than a quarter of a century after their debut, the German outfit still proves its grandiose, harrowing noir flair.

Ride the wave of great music

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