Paralelo’s streamlined melodicism and tactile beats are slick in a way that makes their wall of sound easy to sidle up to and enjoy.
In her new book Poor But Sexy, Agata Pyzik explores how Eastern and Western Europe have perceived one another since the tearing down of the wall that divided them under the duopoly of America and the Soviet Union. The epicentre was Berlin, swirling with ghosts, myths, high culture, crime and mythology. It’s been the rotten apple of the artist’s eye ever since Franz Biberkopf haunted Alexanderplatz, Isherwood bid it adieu and Eno and Bowie set up camp in the late seventies.
Based on an installation running along the footprint of what once comprised the “death strip,” Berlin Wall of Sound is a mix of field recordings, sound and graphics, where art meets music meets documentary. Paralelo are Jonathan Dickens alias J-Lab and Frank Bogdanowitz alias Dr.Nojoke, an Englishman in Berlin and a native son born and raised in West Berlin (guess which is which). In building upon the material for this album, the duo capture the transition of the Cold War’s most notorious unplace into a lively urban neighborhood. Their streamlined melodicism and tactile beats are slick in a way that makes their wall of sound easy to sidle up to and enjoy.
The album glides into motion like a car on the S-Bahn. It gleams squeaky clean, as if the metropolis has shed a skin pockmarked by the past century to become as shiny and breathtakingly towering as Metropolis. Is this echt Berlin? For all its scar tissue, Berlin has been a centre for well-oiled, streamlined motorik visions of the future, from Bauhaus to Kraftwerk. Paralelo attaches itself to this tradition and sings the city atop a steady, heavy bass heartbeat, with the exception of the turgid “Wachturm” midway through—an essay in sound intended to convey the deadly, all-seeing eye manning the barrier, which seems distracted rather than eagle-eyed. Though the following “Gueffroy” certainly rebounds nicely off it (despite being named for the last victim of the guards’ firing orders) and “Neue Strassen II” has an irresistible and momentuous intensity. Berlin Wall of Sound closes with the ambiguous and haunting “S2,” which seems to gather all the sprawling tethers of ideas, memories and impressions of the narrative, as a goose step evolves into a pleasant afternoon stroll.
Berlin Wall of Sound is available on UNOIKI.
