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2LP
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MORR 039LP
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2018 repress; originally released in 2003. With their third studio album Observing Systems, the Tied & Tickled Trio has delivered their most complex self-portrait of a freely-operating music collective. Altogether, the 15 pieces on Observing Systems, some of them not more than highly elaborate and articulate "ideas," form a very tight system itself -- based on musical references, different modi operandi and scientific research -- which reaches less and less for an unconditional formal unity. With Observing Systems, the Tied & Tickled Trio does refine the idea of "space," both sonic and spiritual, in which experiences and emotions echo, in a new and ultimately refreshing purity. Suddenly, what you hear becomes as important as the blanks in the music. In these regions of ruptures and uncertainties, a fantastic vision evolves, which leads the Trio through an intense and continuously inspiring musical past. In these ruptures, music history becomes lively again. Observing Systems is music without a center. As in the architectural concepts of "Tensegrity" by Buckminster Fuller, each track represents one component in this self-suspending, durable construction, a structure whose strength increases with lightness rather than the heaviness of its components: the album as a whole.
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CD
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MORR 077CD
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There's no brass section on Aelita. There are no jazzthetics, in that special sense of how the Tied & Tickled Trio has made them audible, at least in the German guitar-based underground. Aelita starts beyond all expectations: this is a melancholy journey, visiting former visions, futurism, science and science fiction. "Chlebnikov," the title of one of the tracks, is named after the Russian avant garde poet who died of starvation in the 1920s. "A Rocket Debris Cloud Drifts" is the name of another one. The dark side of the moon. Aelita is as rough and open as possible and still very concentrated, minimal, melancholy and excessive. "Tamaghis" is slow and well-travelled dub that sounds like echo-chamber-music, with an orbit that hurtles through space. There are three interpretations of the title track; they are all melancholy miniatures: xylophone, glockenspiel, mellotron, dismal sounds. One might think of a space capsule, that gradually loses its contact to the earth. An obituary of a utopia. On Aelita, the Tied & Tickled Trio are Caspar Brandner, Andreas Gerth, Markus and Micha Acher and Carl Oesterhelt: a band that listens very carefully to what their sounds do.
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LP
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MORR 077LP
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CD
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MORR 060CD
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Originally recorded and mixed in 1996, this record became important in both indie rock and electronic worlds. Six musicians from the Bavarian triangle, Munich, Landsberg, Weilheim. Six musicians with their hearts and homes rooted in indie rock and post-punk, in traditional jazz and contemporary art. Two of them, Markus and Micha Acher, were part of The Notwist, one of the most important bands mapping alternative music in Germany. Others, Johannes Enders and Ulrich Wagenheim, have studied jazz and composition. Andreas Gerth worked as an artist and sculptor, Casper Brandner was a well-known drummer in electronic and analog projects. Released on the small Weilheim-based label Payola, the debut of the Tied & Tickled Trio invented a new way of re-arranging old jazz at least for European listeners. Up to then, jazz and alternative had come together mostly in a noisy, distorted and fast-driven way. On this self-titled debut, the Tied & Tickled Trio reworked jazz in a more complex, more open-minded way. It all was about atmosphere and intensity, about sample, structure and sounds. Post-rock (axis Chicago-Weilheim), dub (Adrian Sherwood's On-U-Sound), old heroes (Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock) -- the press dropped many names to describe (and to celebrate) this album. "Tusovska Dub" is a vibrating echo chamber, a repetitive track crisscrossed by hidden modulations. "Motorik" is a journey into jazz from minimal piano patterns to free-floating woodwind instruments. "Constant" is a polyrhythmic carpet and the track that shows the complex soundings of the Tied & Tickled Trio best: silent to noisy, far beyond to laid-back, old school jazz to electronic postmodernism. Includes a remix by Console.
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CD
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MORR 061CD
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EA1 EA2 was originally released on the small Weilheim-based label Payola in 1999. EA1 EA2 is a cool, calculated album. It is about reducing and pausing; less free-jazz than their debut, like in "D.B. Track," where the nervous shimmering of electronic noises flows into the warmth of a swelling trombone. This isn't a minor record, but it is intensive in a more introverted manner. The different influences of the Tied & Tickled Trio are clearly separated: sensitive jazz without fear of pleasant soundings, noisy but carefully-measured electronics and the polyrhythmic drumming of Markus Acher and Casper Brandner, who had both started the Tied & Tickled Trio as a drums-only duo in 1994. EA1 EA2 deals with the recording studio's possibilities in a curious and open-minded way. It phrases the difference between the live and the studio situation, which from then on became a challenge for the Tied & Tickled Trio. Seven years later, the band released film material of one of their recent concerts on their DVD Observing Systems on Morr Music as a result of this process: their concerts are not just a reproduction of their studio recordings and vice versa.
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CD
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DC 184CD
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"Although EA1 EA2 is the first domestic release from this electro-jazz group, it's their second release overall. Their quest for sound as a final product results in a special kind of communication based on the combination of a strong driving, This Heat-like rhythmical force, the hypermodern kitchen noises of Mouse On Mars, and the superficial sound of Blue Note records -- which when put together don't fit into anybody's pigeonholes. You can hear the sound of 60s jazz as well as experimental/electronic stuff reminiscent of Miles Davis' or Herbie Hancock's 70s jazz sound. Further, you'll find unusual 80s On-U dub sounds mixed with the piece de la momente that crop up from time to time. It's contemporary 'post-rock' with intelligent electronic phrasings."
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