By turns up close and personal, remote and withdrawn, there’s something warm and congenial in this ebb-flow, for all its disorienting and confounding tricks. And where Wuzzelbud KK sometimes had the air of a geek-attended IDM-dance set with a bolt-on of self-conscious fripperies, Thora Vukk comes across like a more complete work of an integral artist making the most of a carefully selected palette.
[Release page] The early 2000’s saw Gabor Schablitzki establish himself with a sharply produced series of 12″s and EPs on Musik Krause. As Robag Wruhme he peddled a smarty-pants brand of microhouse-styled electronica that found long-playing expression on 2004’s Wuzzelbud KK. Seven years on Thora Vukk restates the Jena-based producer’s house credentials, while showing a developed sonic architectural prowess, most evident in the sandwiching of its main tracks with shorter ‘Brücke’ – small vignettes adding to the set’s overall tenor, and further manifested in the wooze and whimsy of its cache of found sound – of bird-chirp, drawer-clunk, patter and chatter.
This is a less muscular, lighter and airier Wruhme – one who holds back on more obvious dancefloor moves to duck’n’dive within a sound “ideal for the bedroom or passenger cabins of any kind.” There’s little of the party animalism of past repute (cf. his louche antics as one half of the Wighnomy Bros; of dj kicks there are few, and, but for its playful spirit, Thora Vukk is a restrained, even refined concoction of lulling piano loops and found sound manipulations. Sure, it’s replete with subtle kinetic tricks and sneaky rhythm-shtick, but it rarely rouses itself to much more than a sedate swing. Typically a few elements are taken, and softly spun, fluidly rotated, here a lounge whiff, there a jazz whiff allowed to drift over just slightly off-beat house templates. The infusion of field recordings affords a plethora of personal sounds a heightened function, whether rhythmic or timbral, providing for diverting twists along the way. On opener “Wupp Dek,” the artist’s way with the play of forms is straightaway on display: the merest hint of rhythm brushed with soft pads and a vocal jingle (“Like it, like it, like it”) ramps up anticipation; groove deferred, Schablitzki teases as far as feasible before letting in a loping beat and further alluring textures, which then cede to an unsettled array of water running, room echoes, tension via a grumbling bass that hi-jacks the opening sequence late on, finally re-routed to a coda of queasy ambiance. Interludes like “Brücke drei” and “Brücke vier” stand as stylistic contrasts with what they bookend, while others seek to open up unexpected turns in deceptively linear developing tracks: the filtered switch-click of a neon-light and dish-rattle consort with a lyrical Rhodes motif, lustrous synth and high-end strings to put the icing on the clunk-kick cake of “Prognosen Bomm.” Then “Tulpa Ovi,” a kind of hushed chamber-house with speaking choir samples, subtle atmospherics built around a well-turned piano; and “Bommsen Böff” with its past-inside-the-present of oddly spooked ambiance, orchestral slivers of film soundtrack wafting through the lazy lurch of its house reduction.
The layered detail, spatial sense and percussive fizz suggest an affinity with Perlon, possibly Cadenza, but Schablitzki has found in DJ Koze and his Pampa natural home, as well as an obvious kindred spirit in lucid post-dance. By turns up close and personal, remote and withdrawn, there’s something warm and congenial in this ebb-flow, for all its disorienting and confounding tricks. And where Wuzzelbud KK sometimes had the air of a geek-attended IDM-dance set with a bolt-on of self-conscious fripperies, Thora Vukk comes across like a more complete work of an integral artist making the most of a carefully selected palette.
Thora Vukk is out now on Pampa. [Release page]
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