(06.25.06) An introspective series of ruminations with guitar, voice and sampled
noises, Putting Holes in October Skies drops the sensitive
songwriter into the electronic landscape. Matthias Grübel’s
voice leaks and sighs over the course of these sixteen tracks, lending
a world-weary gravitas to glitch-haunted music. Imagine the
solitary singer hunched over a beat-up acoustic guitar beneath a
highway overpass with a rack of digital processors at his feet. As he
strums through his wounded songs, a mic routes localized noises
through the bank of filters and turns this industrialized junk into
scattered glitch accompaniment.
“Origami” is folded like a paper crane around a central drum kit loop
as crackling paper, metal pings, and the flapping reverb of a rubber
hose craft the wandering melody. A slow cello provides a tonal
backdrop for Grübel’s dolorous voice as he finds the strength for
only one verse. “So are we now the way we’re supposed to be? I still
can’t help myself; I’m feeling incomplete. Now, after all now, I will
unfold…” The song is buoyed by the drum loop, but it exists in the
vacuum of the expired vocalist; a pop lament with a hole through its
middle. The guitars of “Melting the Ice” chirp like radio signals and
growl with a burr of static, but such enthusiasm still can’t lift
Grübel from the emotional hole into which he has fallen. Noises
— the sound of ice floes breaking up and crashing together — cut
through the guitar melodies like the unrelenting approach of the next
ice age.
Guitar and glitch swirl together in “Cellophane,” one of several short
instrumental interludes where Gr¨bel merges acoustic introspection
with the noisy detritus of a decaying civilization. The sounds of the
world around him unavoidably infect the music and, while they aren’t
addressed directly in his lyrical content, the subtext of their weight
on the narrative voice is plain. By the time, Gr¨bel is able to
find his voice in “How to Become Invisible,” we’ve already been
covered in an avalanche of heavy glitch as if the buildings have come
down around us, demolished by the entropic gravity of our cultural
sorrow.
Putting Holes in October Skies is an interesting take on
emo-glitch, a solitary minstrel finding accompaniment in the cast-off
sounds and digital artefacts of modern life. The record should be
bleaker than it is, and maybe it is saved by the chaotic intrigue of
its compositions. Gr¨bel’s poignant delivery is the sound of a
man losing his individuality within the homogenizing architecture of
21st century life. And yet, the fact that music has been made from
the cacophonous scraps of life is a nugget of unquenchable hopefulness
that persists in the echo of the work’s passage.
Putting Holes in October Skies is out now on Quatermass.
