Roedelius Schneider – Stunden
Bureau B
Hans-Joachim Roedelius’ piano works are so beguilingly primal in their simplicity that their classicism could be overlooked. Even whilst chewing over his most avant-garde moments with kosmische greats Harmonia and Cluster, there remains a strange, indigestible kernel of conservatism to his work; rooted as it is in the tinkling of ivory.
The Berlin-born musician sounds gloriously out of step with both present day and classical traditions. His Selbsportrait series of releases, especially volumes one and two, showcased this man-out-of-time feel brilliantly well — essentially, these are piano compositions, yet their tangents and avant-garde formal experiments morph the simplicity of the piano work into a series of grippingly vivid dreams, as if being shown a door that opens out onto magical vistas.
The tension between classical piano composition and avant-garde recalibration is used to the same effect on Stunden, Roedelius’ new collaboration with To Rococo Rot member Stefan Schneider. The album is centred around three compositions bearing the title of their parent album; each featuring the same stripped-back piano accompanied by Schneider’s synthesiser. For the vast majority of its running time, Stunden is powered by Roedelius’ piano, which marks out territory with a propulsive, motorik forward motion — as on second track ‘Liebe’ — while Schneider’s synths flesh out these forays, providing a rumbling, vast expanse of earthy bass sounds that stops things getting overly technical.
There are moments where the formula of abstracted synth backing piano-led melodies is reversed, though. On ‘Single, Boogie’, for example, it’s Schneider who provides the track’s impetus; Roedelius nimbly charting abstract piano riffs over meditatively plucked guitars and looping bass. Yet it is Schneider’s synthesizer line that pushes onwards, towards a crescendo of modulating tones that provides the song with its dynamic force.
On ‘Boogie Dance’, too, the pair retread their shared kosmische backgrounds on a piece that resembles something from Zuckerzeit. On the track, those bass rumbles off the ‘Stunden’ compositions remain, but the piece is worked on two interlocked, looped sections; one of piano, one of synth, whilst the pair spend the majority of the song busily deconstructing the opening motifs.
Some sections don’t work: ‘Zug’ is too alienating to fit in with an album that otherwise feels encompassing and warm, ‘Miniataur’ feels too glib — like a practice for the album’s finest tracks — and ‘Upper Slaughter’ doesn’t reach any real level of depth over its seven-and-a-half minutes.
These tracks aside, Stunden is a beautiful record; meditative in the least new age-y sense of the word. Its beauty is derived in large part from its expansive use of a simple formula; crafting myriad variations around a constrictive base of piano-led compositions. ‘Stunden I’, ‘Stunden II’ and ‘Stunden III’ feel like the kind of variations of the same base units that Queneau explored in his 99 Exercises in Style, and whilst not being an album of plentiful ideas it is, at least, one which exploits its conceit to the fullest. Felix Petty
