Elektro Guzzi - Observatory Album Review
There's a school of thought in electronic music circles - well, actually we've just made it up - that performers in it's general arc get to experiment a lot more than their counterparts in more traditional spheres. Elektro Guzzi are a 'Techo-tanzband' from Germany who seem to be re-writing the rules to suit themselves: out go overdubs, Ableton and the tightened synthetics which generate so much of the output we hear today. These elements are replaced by a live recording process, using only analogue instruments. The results are mind boggling; a record that pulses with the throb of modern abstract club music, made only from stuff of which most laptop jockeys wouldn't even know which end to pick up.
On their third album - after 2010's eponymous first and it's subsequent follow up 'Parquet' - 'Observatory', Bernhard Hammer, Jakob Schneidewind and Bernhard Breuer are going for broke, piling on the intensity and leaving the listener scratching their head as to understand how the sum of the instrumental parts makes such a monstrous whole.
Clearing themselves of limitations as much as anything else, this is travelogue music par excellence. Opener 'Rough Tide' spinning over and over on axes of tribal percussion and free-wheeling fuzz, the band have described this gestalt as their desired coda for the whole album, namely being: "Futuristic, but also dirty and away from the minimal approach."
Continue reading: Elektro Guzzi - Observatory Album Review