Artists: Jegenhuber
SM Music
Tom Huber und Beat Jegen sind zwei Zürcher Multiinstrumentalisten. Huber betätigt sich überdies als Fotograf und Künstler, Jegen als Produzent im Indie/Alternative/ Pop-Bereich. Schon auf Tom Hubers Soloalben „Playing for the Goats“, und „Walk Through Elko“ arbeiteten die beiden zusammen. Und so funktionier t’s: Tom ist der spontane Macher mit den Ideen, Beat der kritische Analytiker, der sie zündet.
ALOYS ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK
Often enough film music merely serves as decoration or a crutch for mood. Not so in Tobias Noelle’s „Aloys“, a private investigator’s journey to the end of his loneliness. It’s a case in point for a score that carries part of the action and creates layers of meaning, describing fragile realities. Even detached from language and picture the soundtrack deploys a thrilling arc of suspense, penetrating the listener’s inner life like a mild drug. Sustained, laminar sounds in melancholic minor key spread out to form a backdrop tinged in the dullness of everyday life. From it sparkling moments arise in hypnotic tardiness. There’s synthetic reverberations from the echo chambers of memory tootling to the foreground with a cool swagger („Imaginary Dance“), then a bright, clear bell sound drips into consciousness (“Unicorn Bell“). One time it’s a reduced piano theme that descends with even heaviness on everything (“Father Theme”), then the strained silence between minimally set tone sequences (“Silent Panic”, “Below Memories”). The synth and guitar sounds used, neither hi-fi nor trashy, are nebulised, defamiliarised, obliterated are the traces that would allow for temporal or spatial orientation. “Aloys Original Soundtrack” remains impalpable without being totally abstract. It hits the spot right between foreground and background music. Over the length of the 15 tracks the mood balances between dream and nightmare. When dramatic eighties synth fanfares evoke danger, a quick dip into major key offers relief (“High Delusions”). Inversely, even moments of feathery optimism have an aura of latent threat (“True Call”).
In short: A languorous shudder of a record, alluding to Brian Eno or Angelo Badalamenti.
