Joerg Schuster lives in Dortmund, the industrial heart of Germany’s Ruhr Area, and like all impressionistic artists, his work reflects his environment. In this case, the underlying influence on his dub-inflected electronic music is the eternal decay of vanished industry: the bleak mouths of abandoned mines, the corpses of neglected steel foundries and the broken skeletons of run-down factories. Released as a high-quality MP3 album on Thinner (who seem to be all about making music available under the Creative Commons License, bless their hearts), Internal Course is an introspective dub electronic album, a record not out of place on the ~scape or Chain Reaction labels. Schuster’s work is quietly filled with cold grey light filtered through white fog, an atmosphere of unreality which leaches color from the landscape.
While the atmosphere is dominated by a minimal dub aesthetic, Schuster experiments with vocals on this record, playing whispered voices that float through his carefully constructed landscapes like specters. “Listen,” he says in a hushed voice during “Awareness in Time,” “Time passes. Come closer now.” This is the extent of the lyric and he returns again and again, drifting in space, to repeat this valuable observation while the kick drum marches resolutely onward and the bare melodies sound their echoes like distant foghorns. The voice returns again in “Face The Horizon” to intone the plaintive request of “Can you show me the way?” against a quiet Detroit flavored techno piece.
A saxophone sounds over a river of wind in “If It Only Were So Simple” and a chattering percussive loop chases after them. This is one of my favorite tracks on the record. The repetitive swells of sound remind me of the wind passing through collapsed buildings, the shape of the holes in the walls creating tones as they allow the wind to move through the once solid obstacles. The delicate programming of the percussion brings to mind the play of sand particles against stone. “Next To Mont Royal” is another favorite with its popping beat and atmospheric interplay of steam jetting from access panels and water falling randomly through six-inch pipes.
When you get right down to it, since the entire record is available in MP3 format, there isn’t much point to fussing about favorites. The whole record can be readily downloaded and you can keep the tracks you like and jettison the rest. Though, Schuster’s work is so consistently enjoyable that you may just keep the whole record in your rotation.
