Browse by Artist: MOBIUS, GUIDO

Artist:	MOBIUS, GUIDO
Title:	Gebirge
Label:	KARAOKE KALK (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	KK 049CD

This is the third full-length release by Berlin's Guido Möbius. First of all, Gebirge sounds quite different from everything Möbius has previously released. His first two albums, Klisten (Klangkrieg) and Dishoek (Dekoder) featured melodies on a collision course with sounds, styles and idiosyncrasies, melancholy and humor. Everything was interwoven, multi-layered and contrasting. But despite their complexity and their finesse, neither of the two records sounds severe or academic; instead, they delight with genial and intelligent instrumental music. Whereas these two predecessors operate to a great extent without any beats or basses, Guido Möbius makes full use of the latter on Gebirge. Here they are: straight bass drums, sub-basses and handclaps. Also present: all kinds of machinery noises serving as snaredrum-surrogates, clanking metal, spluttering cables and funk-guitars. Furthermore: brass sections that sound as if the inmates of a tuberculosis sanatorium had reluctantly reached for their trumpets. It is out of these elements that Guido Möbius constructs rough, creaking tracks that, despite their strangeness, prompt swaying hips, every time. After all, Gebirge was greatly inspired by Möbius' live sets, which fervently dovetail funk with experimental, noise and techno. And yet Gebirge has another surprise: vocals. Möbius used 4-track-virtuoso Andreas Gogol aka go:gol as a lead singer for this record. Gogol, a multi-instrumentalist himself with a preference for grotesque sound constructions, employs a multitude of onomatopoeic, imaginary tongues on Gebirge. At times, it sounds as if James Brown's body had received Kurt Schwitters' soul. Möbius masters the art of subtly slipping us radical sounds and keeping a track in its flow even with the hardest breaks. An industrial groove mutates into a main-floor rave and eventually into a beatboxing solo. Meditative/Kraut-y guitar-string hammering turns out to be the priming for a tight beat, which again runs into playfully-filtered organ grooves, which again sound the bell for techno-rock and polyphonic brass arrangements. Guido Möbius' music is instantly recognizable because of its wit, its wealth of ideas and its very own humorous, inventive, and charming musical dialect.

Previous Page Index of Artists Next Page