Tolouse Low Trax :: Jeidem Fall (Karaoke Kalk)

Weinrich has a sharp, structured mind for creating rhythms of complexity and duration. Rhythms alone would however soon grow tiresome if they didn’t have something to contrast and complement. Between bedspring bounce and hollow bamboo whonk, Weinrich dabs minimal melody and repetitive vocal samples.

Tolouse Low Trax 'Jeidem Fall'

Tolouse Low Trax For his solo efforts, Detlef Weinrich of Kreidler (“masters of precision electronic pop”) goes under the name Tolouse Low Trax. Cringworthy monicker aside, his is a new take on the industrial aesthetic – not grimy factories and huge, greasy cogwheels, but high-tech, sanitized, flourescent-lighted and digitalized workplaces, everybody in white lab coats. Jeidem Fall essays eight, post-Kraftwerk compositions where the percussion is way up front and its timbre is everything.

Weinrich has a sharp, structured mind for creating rhythms of complexity and duration. Rhythms alone would however soon grow tiresome if they didn’t have something to contrast and complement. Between bedspring bounce and hollow bamboo whonk, Weinrich dabs minimal melody and repetitive vocal samples. Punches of colour blink between the robotic jounce and jangle of “Sussing” and “Civilisation Penta.” “Sa Eline” becomes more than just an entrancing drum circle as prayers snake their way heavenwards. A male and female spit fragments of argument at one another on “Barka,” a lounge space-dub groove with brilliant splashes of steel drums. Between the pinpoint, one-note beeps of “Conpearl Walker,” someone seems to be insisting that “I won’t wear it” with the emphatic intonation of a petulant teenager. “Words are Closed Up”—at least to the non-Russian speaker—on the whip-crack, single-looped beaut rounding off Jeidem Fall, which defies one last expectation with a vaguely Afro-Caribbean flourish buried near the tail end.

A suprematist album, working with fundamental geometrical forms in sound—round ones, square ones.

Jeidem Fall is available on Karoke Kalk. [Buy at Amazon]

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