Despite Asmus Tietchens's creative work seems to me very interesting, I was always seriously afraid of his music. It doesn't mean I hide under bed listening for example to the series of -Menge releases. The thing is that sometimes this German musician's experiments get really terrible and you even wonder how he manages to produce such powerful effect.Such were my thoughts when I started his new CD Flächen Mit Figuren and was listening to the first minutes of the record. Like many previous works of Tietchens, the album turned to be the next trip to another planet. I would rather say not "another", but "alien", desert and terrible planet. Dark otherworldly drone, squeak and crash, metallic noise... Extremely minimalistic noise abstraction starts ruling your mood. Abstract art of such kind is in general a rather dangerous thing. It doesn't give a clear, distinct picture, like a portrait or pop music, it proposes people to get to the labyrinth's start on their own, the first part of the labyrinth is laid with sound, pictures or something else. I liked to listen to Flächen Mit Figuren at night in headphones - if you sit down inside some abandoned plant, though not yet destructed by time. Inside plant having some industrial spirit. Then you can feel the same emotions which I imagine. Or maybe inside a dark room without any door, the only inhabitants of which will be light rays and live shades. After initial immersion into the album starts period of understanding that you are just a trifling point inside a huge, dark world, its simple geometrical figure and at the same time there is a whole world inside you. Simple in complicated, complicated in simple and human body is a cover, layer between universe and powerful energetic cloud cover with flesh. It seems to me more and more that each splash of drone here has its own philosophy. Labyrinths...
- Asmus Tietchens
- Non Visual Objects