Kettenkarussell :: Easy Listening (Giegling)

Returning late to the table, the drolly titled Easy Listening brings their house style to fruition in mesmeric moves and boundary crossings—a ride that, while not of the white-knuckle variety of their namesake (see artwork), undulates with lowercase thrills from lyrical pianism, ambience, downtempo and deep tech-tinges.

Remember micro-house? It didn’t stay around long, as the geek-meets-party thrall palled. A pleasant surprise, then, to find a take on the template tapped into to good effect by Kettenkarussell. The German duo first brought the minimal house down with I Believe You & Me Make Love Forever (2009) and Things Will Never Flange (2010), on Weimar collective label, Giegling, along with a couple of mixes, one for Little White Earbuds (LWE Podcast 58), the other a ssg special for mnml ssgs, one of whose curators waxed: ‘They not only pull off the requisite formulas and push all the right buttons, they add a whole dark thicket full of animated organic sounds, wind up dolls (perhaps demonically possessed, be careful!) and forest clearings filled with soft, shining, melodic lights… fairies?’ (PC, mnml ssgs, 2010). Since then all has been mostly quiet on the production front for Herr Koreander and Leafar Legov, together or solo, though the Giegling label they were involved in founding has grown with the likes of Prince of Denmark (aka Traumprinz), Vril, Edward and Christopher Rau. Returning late to the table, the drolly titled Easy Listening brings their house style to fruition in mesmeric moves and boundary crossings—a ride that, while not of the white-knuckle variety of their namesake (see artwork), undulates with lowercase thrills from lyrical pianism, ambience, downtempo and deep tech-tinges.

Where mainstream techno/house can seem as much about DJ-ego self-construction as it is about The Music™, KK cultivate a somewhat murky persona, an anonymity seen as ‘…one part of our personality […] In our opinion techno should be faceless and not about names or persona, or some nice pants.’ (Little White Earbuds, 2010). Mood-mirroring the shades of the cover’s water-blotched image of a derelict rollercoaster, Easy Listening opens as if broadcast from past times, with a harp-pluck dream sequence, the woozy waver of an orchestral concert pitch, and a Bruce Lee sample about ‘honestly expressing yourself’—a Giegling motto perhaps. Then “Drama” creeps in with a sneaky guitar motif and syncopated mnml/downtempo beats—a groove that’s rare but uncultivated. First genuine dance gestures surface on “Konstant Sleep,” a more upbeat take on “You’n’Me” extending hypnotically. A shift to downer tempo comes in the breakbeat chill of “Haller”—somewhere between Mo’ Wax and Giegling sample-monger, Dwig. Intertextual touches abound—from playful on the thinly veiled BoC pastiche “Chords of Banana” (see what they did there?) to po-faced on the Reichian concatenations of “Spirale.” “Krusty Dreams” is music to stomp on the leaf-Kompakted floor of Königsforst to, while chords of AFX-ian synth banana-bit-crush sweet(‘n’sour)en the rimshot-propelled “The End.” Sample-wash and field-fizz striate the beat patter, the air of a presenting past, retrieved from tape depredations, drawn from memory drift. KK say: ‘…most of what we bring out is pretty much imperfect and has something super realistic to it…’ (xlr8r). In signature Giegling style sampled snippets of jazz—horns, drum breaks—endow proceedings with a naturalism and humanity far from Microhouse v.1.0.

All in all, Easy Listening is a quietly engaging debut from the tone-setters of the Giegling collective, in the vanguard of regional artists cultivating a distinct house style. Kettenkarussell’s is a voice of its own deriving from genre-transgressive instrumentation and a ludic trope-pushing spirit, flickbook-ing through the mind’s musical archives.

Easy Listening is avaialble on Giegling.