It is this brevity and the exquisite song crafting therein which I believe has kept Atol Scrap head and shoulders above the fray and forgotten albums of the era.
Music that is absolutely gorgeous in all aspects
It’s this author’s humble opinion that Arovane gets a bad rap. Especially for Atol Scrap. The authority of Boomkat.com no less says: “This was a horrible time in electronic music; horrible we tell u; the relentless chiastic slide knockoff era. This one’s kinda on that tip, but in the top tier…”
Firstly, to dismiss all 1999-era music other than say the big names of the time—Autechre, Aphex Twin (who hadn’t released a new album since 1995’s …I Care Because You Do (Warp)), Monolake, Jega, μ-Ziq—is done perhaps for hyperbolic value but lands more as a damning indictment of a subtextual implication that it all sucked but for the big artists of the time.
Autechre era
While I am an unapologetic Autechre fanboy—all of it, not just the IDM era stuff which, yes, includes Confield, though I found Draft 7.30 eludes me to this day for the most part—it seems woefully ignorant to paint everything of the era as an endless series of rips on Chiastic Slide (Warp) which had come out in February of 1997. Make no mistake, though, kids, that album had a positively seismic effect on your ears when you first heard it after ripping off the plastic wrap on the CD and slapping it into your DiscMan for your trudge to work. Yet even while Chiastic was genre bending and breaking and easily the last universally loved record Autechre made before launching into space never to return it was hardly the benchmark of the era despite the fact that Warp ruled over all back in those heady, pre-millennium days.
Outliving and thriving beyond the lifespan of ones competition is often the best revenge it is said. Even better to do so quietly and competently, thus compelling history to turn back and re-evaluate a work from the past.
Speaking as a musician who at the time firmly had his nose lodged deep in the hole of the Chiastic Slide CD in order to perhaps gain knowledge by osmosis or minor lacerations, there was so much happening in music back then. As a listener you were bombarded by the second or perhaps third wave of techno after IDM split from the rave scene and became its own juggernaut for a time. Also there was a bulk of post-rock coming out of all corners be it Stereolab, Tortoise or To Rococo Rot. I listened and tried desperately to comprehend what was going on in these songs and then replicate them on the ragged array of devices I’d crammed into an uninsulated attic studio where I froze in winter and roasted in summer while making my own pastiche of IDM and techno inspired music under the Cathode Ray Tube moniker.
Looking back
By 1999, arguably the toddler phase of IDM, so much electronic music was an amalgam of Warp, Rephlex, Basic Channel and too many labels to mention. It was reminiscent of a decade earlier when punks, metalhead and even goths began to embrace rap and hiphop, uniting these disparate tribes together at shows where in 1989 you were no longer shocked to see someone wearing a Public Enemy shirt under a jean jacket with a Metallica back patch on it. So too in 1999 one began to see and hear acts from all over blending a variety of styles together while also perhaps in some cases aping the more famous acts. In this category I’d say Funkstörung were far worse than Arovane for their outright parallel of Autechre’s sound during the Chiastic Slide era.
Inoffensive music
Arovane himself has always made a music that at its worst could be called “inoffensive.” This is not a dismissal, more an impression as his music lacks rough edges for the most part. Whereas Chiastic Slide is chock full of screeching, banging twists and turns, Atol Scrap is packed with a variety of styles, moods and methods which were new for the time but non-confrontational. The same could be said of Arovane’s 2000 sophomore album Tides (City Centre Offices) which, while bearing some similarity to Music Has The Right To Children (Warp), lacks BoC’s classic album’s occasional sinister tones and incipient dread amidst the head nodding hiphop beats and hazy synth pads.
Atol Scrap in fact bears more similarity to the work of other Berlin and German based artists like Monolake, Pole, Basic Channel and Schneider TM to name a few. Though the names of each track bears the hallmark of what could be called Alpha Centauri Celtic in their spelling—which yes, Autechre did and still do though it could all just be typos as well—the sounds are far more indicative of the Berlin scene than that of London, Manchester or Sheffield’s Rochdale area. There’s a strong melodic stream running through it, far stronger than even Autechre who once upon a time dealt in melody like us mere mortals. “tascel_7” bonks, chitters and clanks its way through a scenic country road on a crisp Autumn day, for instance. “thaem nue” plods along gently like a beloved old dog with its thudding drums as the detuned synthetic Rhodes keys plonk about. “ambelio” is drenched in reverb with swirling pads and plinking keys while a beat slowly rolls into hearing and takes us out into the ether. “failed” is just plain creepy with the gloppy amorphous bass lurking behind clipped beats and warbling synth strings. This album goes to more unique and untouched places than Chiastic Slide does.
Brevity
Another area in which Atol Scrap deviates from Autechre’s work is in its brevity. Few of the tracks exceed five minutes and the longest tops out at only seven minutes forty-five seconds. Compare this to Chiastic Slide where the shortest track is two minutes eight seconds while the longest is a massive thirteen minutes thirteen seconds long (yes, those who know my music will also find some ten minute plus in my discography, some of which are too long by half). In this I think it excels beyond much of the music of that era where the CD format allowed for longer tracks and artists routinely wrote seventeen and twenty minute tracks (many of which contained several minutes of silence which on first listen made you check the wires of your stereo or raise the volume only to soil your pants when the boffo ending of the track blasted out your speakers and your unsuspecting ears). It is this brevity and the exquisite song crafting therein which I believe has kept Atol Scrap head and shoulders above the fray and forgotten albums of the era, not the fact that in some parts—yes it does sound a tad like Autechre’s fourth album.
Furthermore to this day Arovane is still putting out music that is absolutely gorgeous in all aspects. This is no small feat considering the dearth of music from the era in which Uwe Zahn began making music where few artists are remembered as well as he. Thus it’s even more fitting that such a classic be released on vinyl (as part of Keplar’s KeplarRev series) when it debuted in an era where vinyl was effectively dead. Outliving and thriving beyond the lifespan of ones competition is often the best revenge it is said. Even better to do so quietly and competently, thus compelling history to turn back and re-evaluate a work from the past.
Atol Scrap (2021 Remaster) is available on Keplar. [Bandcamp]
