BLACK TO COMM Vinilo y CD

Review: Two years after Marc Richter released his most widely available album Back To Comm album, Alphabet 1968, on the ever amazing Tape imprint, he delivered another landmark with Earth. Originally, the music was conceived to accompany two screenings of the video Earth by Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen. First commissioned for the Sydney Festival 2011, the visual work was scored by Melbourne's Oren Ambarchi for the grand unveiling, but then toured the planet, with different musicians invited to reimagine the soundtrack for different locations. Germany's Black To Comm was enlisted for Berlin and Krakow, and as the smart money was always on, he offered up a strange, beguiling, abstract but highly visceral score. Almost impossible to describe, at once witty but incredibly sad, troubling and intriguing, traumatised but honest, it might be the perfect accompaniment to a film in which several frames are dedicated to landscapes piled high with human corpses. Following the two live performances, the producer opted to make these 'tunes' his next record, which is now finally getting a reissue.

Review: When Black To Comm's staggeringly powerful Alphabet 1968 first landed, rather confusingly in 2010, it stood out on a burgeoning ambient and drone landscape for several reasons. Firstly, it was rather short. Certainly in comparison to similar sounding releases of the day - less than 45 minutes. Secondly, it managed to cram, or rather delicately introduce, myriad sub genres and styles within the relatively brief run time. Each track comes across as though it is autonomous, yet the collection really needs to be explored as a whole to get the full impact. So while 'Trapez' has this stunning, purposefully naive quality to it - like a music box fed through various levels of distortion, chimes straining through the muffled playback - preceding number 'Forst' is this grand, palatial overture of refrains and background marching drums, taking up a full quarter of the entire album on its own. Elsewhere, 'Traum Gmbh' brings fret and chaos to the equation, shrill notes invoking horror movie scenes, while 'Musik Fur Alle' invites us into an aural realm that owes much to candlelit folk tales.