The Old School Groovebox from Hell, the Roland MC-505, has been part of electronic music long enough that the very timbre of its sound is enough to send some musicians running in terror. Bernard Fleischmann and Herbert Weixelbaum have nimble fingers and show no fear, embracing that which terrifies weaker electronic artists. Brought together by accident in Vienna, the two discovered a mutual love/hate relationship with the MC-505 and share their enthusiasm for the old ways by sussing out new sounds and rhythms from the ancient Groovebox. Recording as Duo505, their Late record is both a flying wedge of lo-fi cheese electronica and a wheezing etude of decrepit machinery spitting out its final Romantic melody.
There is a decay to the sound they eke out of the machine, a fading burble of melody that is pure low fidelity. These are analog soundtracks to student films from the 1980s where everyone wanted to be like Jan Hammer and the starving instrumentalists of the world were discovering the open spaces beyond their synthesizer presets. Pop music could still be “winsome” and “innocent.” While Fleischmann and Weixelbaum embrace the historical sound of the Groovebox, they don’t completely succumb to writing a KTel-style retrospective. They push the 505; they look for its flaws and its shortcomings and draw those ragged edges into the spotlight. It’s the electronic equivalent of rocking out so hard that you break your strings and pop a drum head.
“Tsip Tsap” percolates until its half-life is reached and then it falls apart quickly, the melody disintegrating and the beats collapsing in a shower of rust. The counterpoint of “Facing It” is a metallic clatter of unrestrained machinery, cogs and wheels that are spanging off one another inside the black box. “Toru Okada” spirals up like a watch wound too tightly, its spring compressing into a compact bundle of nervous energy, ready to explode in a second. “Wenig” is flashed with bubbling noise, chattering and popping sonic garbage that sounds like noise piped in from a live underwater Pan Sonic show.
Late is a record driven by the heart and the gut, a record where the clinical and analytical is set aside. Fleischmann and Weixelbaum know the knobs on the Groovebox well enough they don’t have to actively think about what they are doing when they tweak; they simply touch the knobs and feel their way through the music. Late is a record with no agenda: it is frisky and playful, and no one will sprain anything getting in and out the Electro Way-Back Machine. Late is early, really, an uncomplicated reanimation of the old sounds under the spirited emotional guidance of the new guard.
Late is out 8/24 on Morr Music.
