(01.27.08) Danny Wolfers, better known as Legowelt, is one of the most prolific producers in the world of electronic music. The Hague denizen turns his vintage, and nicknamed, synthesizers to a variety of sounds, creating lush ambient soundscapes, deep jaking house numbers and sleazy electro tracks. In 2004 Wolfers’ set up his own label, Strange Life Records. Since its inception, the imprint has released works by Luke Eargoggle, Unit Black Flight and Wolfers under an array of monikers. Recently Strange Life has looked to Italy and found an artist by the name of Heinrich Dressel, better known as the head honcho of MinimalRome: Composite Profuse. Dressel’s style is quite different to the minimal electro stylings of Composite Profuse, stylings profiled in his first release and full length production: Mons Testaceum.
Dressel is a blend of John Carpenter soundtrack and deep space ambience. The synthesizer lines are thick and overarching, yet there is an otherworldly separation in there; illustrated immediately with the opening track “Welcome to Mons Testaceum.” Dressel’s synthesizer comes back to earth with “Journey Through the Caves Under the Hill.” The melodies are dark and analogue drenched. The beats are measured and the tempo deep. Dressel plays with the chords, nudging them through slight passages and corridors. With his synthesizer thoroughly warmed up Dressel pushes it into tweaking mode with “The Magic Broken Teapot”, a beautifully textured work of bubbling electronix. Mons Testaceum once more tests the timorous layers of the dark as “Fohat Digs Holes in the Amphora” clambers from the darkness to whisper ghostly ambient sounds through the speakers.
“Tumbling Pots Down The Path” tumbles to life with folds of synthesized sound, Dressel turning his analog loops over themselves whilst injecting an evil acid edge. The track has a haunting suffocating quality, a decompression of sliding melodies in an almost beatless climb. The Italian capital is never far from the MinimalRome mind and features prominently in the Dressel mind frame, demonstrated in the isolation and intensity of “Night Comes in the Broken Pots Forrest.” The analog sound is pushed and pulled, tweaked and made cold; making the lonely soul lost in this forest of electronix to pick up their step as the tempo rises adding to the terror and paranoia. The dark fear is escalates in “Ghastly Signals from the Night,” a dripping and clinical work of psycho-sound dread. Dressel finally allows his listener out of the mounting anxiety, into a plain of calm as the softer tones of “The Dawn from the Top of the Hill” usher in a new day where the unknown of the night has turned into the real.
Dressel’s tracks can’t be simply described as ambient or electro, they hold elements of both but break from the genres too. The measured solitude of the synthlines give an immense power to the tracks, but ground them in a late 80s movie soundtrack style. These are pieces for untold stories, dark figures and shadowy automobiles, intense cityscapes and lost lives. Mons Testaceum is a screenplay of sound, an audio scenario of human curiosity, dismay and final realization. The album is a sonorous journey through the darker side of electro and what can be accomplished with such a sound. [Purchase]
Mons Testaceum is out now on Strange Life.
