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Strings + Feedback . Andrew Pekler

 

staubgold 62
2005. cd . dl . lp

The ten tracks on this new album embark on an excursion into the direct vicinity of sounds and into the inner life of the mixing desk. It is here where sounds are organized, where they all must pass through, that Pekler develops his breathtaking signal flow. Calm and patient he opens up the material from the inside and self-confidently develops a music consisting of only very few essential elements.

"Strings and Feedback": Very lucid and rough. Inside his mixing console, Pekler confronts a few strings and piano samples (taken mostly from Morton Feldman's work in the 1950s) with themselves, forcing unpredictable encounters, intensification and distortion. He inaugurates an interplay of reminiscences and unreliable fragments of a chapter in the history of music which lies behind us. If Pekler on his previous albums appeared as a minute observer who knows how to describe even the most delicate atmospheric conditions through music, then on "Strings and Feedback" he has become an intermediary between sound worlds.

Similar to the imaginary circuit diagram on the album's cover, Pekler's pieces leave the safe and beaten tracks on which most specialists tread and instead create open-ended and yet to be discovered paths which cannot be described through the logic of a manual. It may be unintentional that the cover design is reminiscent of the 1960s situationist's visionary city maps, but it matches Pekler's approach to create a new topography by re-organizing existing sound material.

On "Strings And Feedback", Andrew Pekler brings into being an impressive music which manages to convince the listener not despite its renunciation of compositional variety, but because of it. Or, in the words of Yoko Ono: Draw a map and get lost.

(text: Stefan Schneider)

Andrew Pekler

Andrew Pekler traces his roots to early jazz/electronica experiments, toying with subtle traces of funk, transformed remnants of Berlin urban dub, and raw found sounds that build up and dissolve in angular spaces of sliding atonal melodies. His first album under the name of Andrew Pekler is an intriguing take on the man/machine interplay with a cold alien groove of midnight jazz café reemerging in the world of clicks and bleeps. An atmosphere of free-spirited jazz improvisation entering the world of clicks + cuts.

Andrew Pekler's musical biography begins in Monterey, California. There he spent his high school years listening to Slayer and the Velvet Underground, learning the secrets of the electric guitar and playing in various bands. Next station, Heidelberg, Germany 1995, where Andrew found himself working in a record store and exploring alternatives to his guitar-based teenage socialization. Soon he was involved in various musical projects; as guitarist and singer in garage rock/noise combo Mucus 2 and as multi-instrumentalist in pop/electronica band Bergheim 34 (Klang Electronic). In his free time at home, using a simple four-track tape machine, a keyboard and a mattress for a bass drum he worked on short instrumental sketches musically somewhere between Money Mark and Curd Duca. In 1998 Source Records released Sad Rockets' (the name Pekler gave this project) debut album 'Plays' to international acclaim.

2000 saw the release of Sad Rockets' 'Once Upon A Time Called Now' on Morbid (sub-label of Vienna's Cheap Records), and the album 'Transition' on US indie Matador. Sad Rockets' first first live gigs in the Spring of 2001 took Pekler and friends around much of Europe before the tour's successful conclusion at the Sonar Festival in Barcelona. His subsequent relocation to Berlin brought with it new contacts. Among them, Scape Records who requested a track for the 'Staedtizism 2' compilation. The mutual interest eventually resulted in 'Station To Station', Andrew Pekler's first full-length under his own name.

andrewpekler.blogspot.de/