<- w2 page cd
<- w2 page press

Notes:

Music is as much about metrics and measurement, gauging and arithmetic as it is about sounds. The pitch ratio of 2:1 which produces an octave and lies at the root of European harmonics is not the only example. Since the days of Pythagoras, musical ratio and the symmetries of human limbs were thought to be related through certain magical numbers, and of course you'll find them on this album: there's "8", as in: the number of tracks on the record, and one of the most central pythagorean numbers. But underneath, you'll find a more important one: five, as in "take five", "give me five", "high five" or the number of tracks on the advance CD. 5 -that's as many as the human hand has digits; unite them, and you will have a fist, spread them, and you can break them, hear them crack. Feel the pain. Creation? Destruction? Obtaining the coefficients of an equation which regards destruction and creation as mere special cases of universal instrumentalism is more like it. Drums & guitars: the instruments with which Michael Wertmüller of Alboth!-notoriety and Swiss guitar experimentalist Stephan Wittwer implement their vast expert knowledge concerning a higher degree of robust nonlinear noise performance require human hands for use and maintenance. Where human hands are concerned, the descriptive fallacy of believing in authentic, eruptive, or otherwise primordially chthonic modes of expression is usually the biggest temptation for anyone trying to talk about what is to be heard. With Werther/Wittwer, on the other hand, you cannot help but register the adaption action on the performers' side: while glistening intiricacies of blistering intensity elbow each other out of your hearing awareness, you realise that this is about altering the scaling factors of each artist's limbs as much as it is about anything as corny as "immediacy" or "full contact acoustics ".

The switching surfaces of this massive block of noise denote a lot of respect for constructive, functional and technical aspects of the general process named "delivering", "lashing out at your surroundings " or just generally "fucking shit up". It is an all-out frontal assault which becomes all the more tingling where the overall enormity of it all seeps through slow, creeping passages, only to be torn apart by new instabilities, rushes and gushes of white, black and purple noise or deteriorated damping effects. This juggernaut of efficiency is no stranger to ostension, accidental/incidental significance and deliberate tearing-down of its own expressive achievements, but the true value of it lies neither with its being the conveyor of sublime yet unspeakable emotions nor with its qualities as a hymn to the power of anyone composer's intellect. Rather, this should be experienced and enjoyed as a very controlled demonstration under laboratory conditions of some universally applicable rule of heaviness, the flow-chart of a strange energy metabolism, as if one could actually listen to the large-scale conversion of starlight into far-infrared radiation and thus detect a superior civilisation hiding behind the shield of a Dyson Sphere. Did I mention that you have to play this real loud? Imagine Black Sabbath adjusted to the increased sensitiviy of an augmented and modified human frame. Or an out of body-experience which sends you to Venus, where the surface temperature gets so hot that the secenery is illuminated by glowing chunks of rock. This music is not just pushing weight, it's pushing the envelope.

by: Dietmar Dath
<- w2 page cd
<- w2 page press