MODERAT - Walls

Apparat is the boy next door. He welcomes you into his living room with Persian rugs, you take off your shoes and he lends you his flip-flops bought in Brazil, you sink into the softness of his sofa, an Indian tea with peach aromas, he lights opium incense, hands you his joint and you spend the whole evening staring into the void. Because that's what his latest "Walls" communicates. So much baroque flourish, technical refinery, electronic embroidery to give shape to nothingness. Pop ballads made of sleepless nights spent adding bleeps here and there, xylophones à la Kim Hiortoy tracing a melodic path with Northern European intentions. Apparat seems unaware of the world that keeps turning, stagnant once again in ideas that aren't his own, not wanting to push forward, but to show off. A sound that follows the times without altering them, music made of dreamy progressions without leaving room for the magic it should be giving us.

Sascha Ring (his real name) marks his artistic path with the creation of Shitkatapult, an excellent electronic label in partnership with the more visionary Marco Haas, aka T.Raumschmiere. Shitkatapult has given us great musical moments, including in its catalogue names like Rechezentrum, Peter Grummich, Hakan Lidbo and other future revelations from the Berlin underground. Apparat has always been the most abstract name on the roster, favouring broken rhythms over the 4/4 techno metronome, flirting with pop temptations, made explicit by his collaboration with Gianna Nannini. Sascha strikes me as more shrewd than talented, picking up other people's ideas to craft an already-familiar, more accessible style, flirting with the idea of an adventurous listen only to end up sketching a sound that slips by without leaving a trace. The organisers of events around the world certainly don't see it the way I do, though, since his name now seems to be a must-have on every self-respecting electronic festival lineup.

Having marked his path with last year's collaborative album with Ellen Allien (which was also a fine record), Sascha seems to have taken off thanks to the high-impact commercial tactics of the BPitch crew. Marketing also peppered with tabloid-scandal episodes (a rumored romance between Ellen and Sascha) unprecedented in the electronic field. The picture is completed by this album. "Walls" wants to be pop, and the use of vocals over electronic textures alone could signal the path Apparat has taken, as could the sounds themselves. Chart-ready melodies, Nordic progressions very much in the vein of Sigur Rós, a cut&paste of ideas from James Holden/Nathan Fake, rhythms straight out of Ableton Live's sample libraries (the software for making electronic music). In the textures of "Walls" I see no passion, only a desk-planned programming of his emotions, bringing in voices like Raz Ohara and Thom Yorke (why Thom? why this nonsense?), half-Telefon Tel Aviv programming, and other engineers of sound rather than artists of it.

The whole album drags on in this non-form of melancholy, often broken up by tediously dull string inserts, pointless glitches and other sonic weaves of the tightest possible knit. Insipid, this "Walls", with neither substance nor craft, a return to that bedroom electronica which had already overindulged in certain ignorances of the independent record market and today comes back to bore us, with nothing new to say.

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21/05/2007