From start to finish Neostalgia offers an elegant and absorbing listen. It may have taken four years to blend and ferment as other projects for both artists came to the fore, but that extra time spent on the hard drive before being passed off to listeners has made it both sweet and subtle.
An elegant and absorbing listen
When Bureau B puts out a record, stand up and pay attention. Neostalgia from Heiko Maile and Julian Demarre is one to pay attention too. Conjuring up a suite of songs bathed in a warm hauntological futurism, it combines electro sounds past with revelatory beats and synthscapes edging towards the strange attractor of an approaching singularity.
This album began its life as one of countless other albums in the space opened up by the coronavirus pandemic, during the boon of free time many of us had at our disposal in 2020. Some people got caught up in endless anxiety by using the time to doom scroll, while others did what many artists do, and used the stress as a way to push their creative output. Music, literature, art, these were perhaps some of the best byproducts that came out of that whole sordid mess. These pieces written between Maile and Demarre started as an audio diary during all that time they each had at home. Still, life intervenes and other things came up, so it is only now just surfacing.
Up-tempo beats merge with subconscious memories, synthetic memories or memories of synthesizers past and the “algorithms that keep me numb so I can sleep.” There is a heaviness reflecting of the time it was made, a small album of music made while the world crashes.
“Here the simple press of a button, there a nightmare out of nowhere,” a spooky voice intones on the second track “Reflection (Dark Horses).” The buttons pressed when making music are certainly more fun than buttons pressed by those in power, making decisions affecting the rest of the population. The fear of those buttons lingers yet.
The perennial allure ::
The perennial allure of “Numbers Stations” for electronic musicians surfaces again on the track of that title. I never get tired of hearing the way these shortwave transmissions get sampled and used by artists. This is another fine example of that trope in the genre, and the mysterious voices reading the numbers transform into sequencer bliss, another kind of music by the numbers, with buzzy chords layered over as top notes.
Funky whiffs of vibrato and esoteric riffs spin around a different kind of glittering disco ball on the club or bedroom friendly “Serengeti Ostinato.” The album isn’t all heaviness, but also has some heat. This one reminds me of video game soundtracks on racing games when the car is moving through city streets filled with nightlife and the promise of adventure.
“Universe Universe” features a female narrator philosophizing on matters of existential angst or hope, depending on your perspective, i.e., the much-vaunted singularity, as mesmeric rhythms flow underneath the spoken word.
“Helios” and “Hollow Earth” are probably my favorite pieces on this album, both being dynamic excursion into other planes of bliss. On “Helios” it’s the bass heavy synth lead played over the driving staccato and steady pulse that get my own pulse moving, while on “Hollow Earth” it’s the other worldly—or inner worldly—abstractions that descend down a tunnel into a pit of flowing magma of interwoven and jittery electro percussion with bright keyboard brass blasting at just the right moments.
From start to finish Neostalgia offers an elegant and absorbing listen. It may have taken four years to blend and ferment as other projects for both artists came to the fore, but that extra time spent on the hard drive before being passed off to listeners has made it both sweet and subtle.
Neostalgia is available on Bureau B. [Bandcamp]
