(07.17.07) In 1977 performance artist Joseph Beuys pumped honey through a museum in
his installation piece, Honigpumpe Am Arbeitsplatz. Thirty years on,
performance musician Thomas Fehlmann pumps viscous, thick,
transparent-treacle timbres through his own Honigpumpe. Sweet but smoky,
and sticking to the sides, taking time to go down, in constant pulse and
atmo-tion, paralleling the honeycomb’s ambi-valency — a firm structural
core (techno) with porosity (dub) and flow (ambient). With Fehlmann as
medium, Beuys keeps swinging. 25 years of musical vintage initially at the
leftfield rock face but latterly at the electronic circuit fringes gives
Fehlmann veteran status, though there’s no trace of musical middle-age
spread in evidence, with Honigpumpe a more energy-charged In The Now affair
than the mellower downtempo of 2004’s Lowflow. In the school of Kompakt,
Fehlmann may be something like head prefect to Voigt’s principal, and much
of this collection rides on variants of the Cologne creed’s obliquely
melodious thunk, though withholding those darker Gas clouds, favouring
other lighter vapours.
This subtle electro-soul seduction is front-loaded with “Stralensatz,”
whose bottom-end whomp makes like that pump, honeying up the ear-canal.
Fehlmann juxtaposes familiar with unwonted elements and places them into
naturalistic settings, spinning spirals and snakes over a shagpile covered
floor-stomp, tight at the centre, loose at the edges. By the time the
foaming “Schaum” comes around, a thickening, deepened dub is lathered up,
awash with drifting pads and Berlin-inclined metallic stabs. “T.R.N.T.T.F”
gives the old Kompakt Schaffel-beat a re-run, complete with sneaky snatch
of Canned Heat’s “On the Road Again.” Then “Little Big Horn” is retooled
into a Neu Motorik groove of techno-funk city with echoes of Krautrock
cosmicity. On the likes of “Bienekonigin,” “Arbeitstitel” and “Dusted With
Powder” he manages to make the various strands of his out-rock,
experimental electro, ambient, and techno past reach a satisfying
accommodation. With fewer steps outside the pump room than on previous
Fehlmanns, <b>Honigpumpe</b> has the feel of a more relaxed mix album of variant
bpms, save the graceful synthhaze of the beatless Pop Ambient (2005) of
finale “With Oil.”
So the flow goes, less slow and low, with Fehlmann fusing armchair techno
with dancefloor soundscape. And Honigpumpe stands almost like a monument, a
compendium charting the ambit between Kompakt’s Twin Towers of dance and
drift, earth and air, soma and psyche. [Purchase
