I confess to having been out of the loop, to the latest machinations in the solo world of Blixa Bargeld. This then, the second album release in 3 years, to feature a collaboration with Teho Teardo, comes as a welcome reaffirmation.
The appearance of ‘Kollaps’, (“one of the most shocking visions ever committed to vinyl”), courtesy of John Peel, on the relatively blank teenage canvas of my horizon in 1981, changed EVERYTHING. To this day, my identify is intrinsically linked with Einstürzende Neubauten’s Toltec petroglyph, having long since adopted this totem as my own. Back then, already streamlined for a career in architecture, the translation of the band’s name, as “collapsing new buildings”, rang with an irony that I still fervently relish.
Other than to a myriad of unconscious possibilities, Teho Teardo is a multi-instrumental artist whose work, I am unfamiliar with. In researching his past and collaborative output, it feels as though I have been on a preordained collision course with these, “classic gentlemen” – ‘The Ambassadors’ of philosophy, mortality, religion and illusion, as thematically alluded to on the album cover artwork, inspired by the 1533 painting by Hans Holbein The Younger.
It seems particularly fitting that ‘Nerissimo’ is recorded in Italian, German and English. Italy has of late, yielded the lion’s share of my recent musical appetite, in much the same way that German had filled my adolescent void – proof positive that “language” is no barrier, to revelling in emotive passion…
Opening track, ‘Nerissimo’, resonates with the unmistakable timbre, of Blixa’s world-weary voice, intoning an instrumental quality, at home among it’s woodwind brethren, evocative of the light spectrum emitted by a glass prism, seemingly from nothingness, the “blackest”, sheds it’s transformative skin, renewed and re-energised in an orgy of colour; ‘DHX 2’, is a richly textured, debilitatingly, swelling paean to HOPE – suggesting it’s elusive ecstasy, “should be a controlled substance”; ‘Ich Bin Dabei’, paints from an oppressive grey, winter palette, vanquishing the gloom with transformative, enlightening adoration; ‘The Empty Boat’, conjures an unburdened, symbolic vessel, devoid of entanglement, yet open to boundless possibility; ‘The Beast’, thrums with a stridently euphonious charm, a discordant leviathan pitted against, “the better angels of our nature”…
‘Animelle’, is a glowing soundtrack, igniting a removed narrative, an unwelcome invitation to a celestial ante-room, revealing a tantalising glimpse, of the great beyond; ‘Ulgæ’ (A Micro-Biological Opera), is a cautionary, spoken-word tale of longing, unrequited love and bacterial insurrection; ‘Nirgendheim’, is a sombre ‘Nowhere-Home’, referencing Errico Malatesta’s life in exile – a celebration of this unconquered Roman son; ‘Give Me’, is a lullaby to desirous devotion, a melodious dirge, decrying an absence of dubiety; ‘Nerissimo (Italian)’ is as above, but this time with an authenticity borne of native conception, rebuffing the linguistic lethargy, of an “English” homogeneity, rekindling the spark, spirit and romance of the mother-tongue…
‘Nerissimo’ is perhaps synonymous with the anamorphosis at play here, where Bargeld and Teardo represent the twin chambers of bicameralism, the music and the muse, the speaker and the listener, the protagonist ‘Ambassadors’, a magnum opus, pregnant with allegory…
Available now on the Spècula Records Label.
