Kammerflimmer Kollektief - Désarroi (2015)

Staubgold presents Désarroi, the tenth album by German ensemble Kammerflimmer Kollektief. Since Thomas Weber founded the group in 1996, its work has meandered between precision and freedom, delivering music that would scorch the paper if one tried to score it. Kammerflimmer Kollektief's art is deception -- a persuasive and seductive art of disorientation and misdirection, with a lucidity and precision approaching what Robert Musil (above suspicion of being a romanticist) called "daylight mysticism." Désarroi (Disorientation), perhaps the group's wildest work, does it again: welcome back to the Kammerflimmery! The Kollektief delivers a few characteristic elements right from the opening track, with Heike Aumüller's free, unsentimental harmonium, played with an air of sehnsucht (inadequately translated as "longing"), resembling a free jazz counterpart to reggae producer and melodica master Augustus Pablo, while Johannes Frisch's magic, free-wheeling double bass creaks along. The album explodes with a dash of Swedish biker-rock passion that momentarily dispels the trappings of modernity, though concrete reality seems to return by the album's end. The Kollektief has long been developing an amalgam of FX culture, psychedelia, free form, dub, improv, and ritual activities, taking only what is of use, with the collected elements taking on a mythical weight. What was once a bass becomes a creak. What was once a voice becomes a phoneme. What was once a guitar becomes a gnarly notion of something strummed. All the while, Weber masks his guitar's effects, leaving them as unidentifiable yet familiar sounds to be incorporated into the singular tone continuum of Kammerflimmery. Like the shaman who in the morning simply hangs up his magic roots to dry in preparation for his nightly ecstatic routines, the Kollektief incorporates the ordinary and familiar into its rituals. Maybe that's why they cover "Zurück zum Beton" ("Back to Concrete"), the 1978 hit by West German punk legends S.Y.P.H. They interpret the track not as a grim punk anthem but as an erotic celebration of a life in order, of alltag and künstlichkeit -- familiarity and artificiality. Over there, pure nature. Over here, humankind. In between, the magical pragmatism of Kammerflimmer Kollektief. On Désarroi, in a fashion perhaps even more pronounced than on previous works, the Kollektief works with a delicate, tender sensibility, highlighted by Aumüller's voice, which has never been heard like this on record before.