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Dictaphone | M.=Addiction

Fragile but intriguing jazz landscapes that succeed in bringing together the best of live instrumentation and new electronica
CD, City Centre Offices/Lowlands

Tekst: da volgaBabe

Publicatiedatum: 15 december 2002

Dictaphone is being heralded by Wire's Colin Newman as 'timeless, unusual and beautiful'. And while about its timelessness we will not make any comments (way too early for that, we reckon), the attributes "unusual" and "beautiful" cover most of the ground that Brussels-bred Oliver Doerell and his mate Roger Döring are operating on. Most of the tracks are jazzy and cinematic landscapes irregularly perpetrated by glitchy electronica. A comparison with those other Brussels residents Tuxedomoon imposes itself almost immediately, but we found traces of musique concrete and a fascination with sound-building à la Asmus Tietchens is recognizable too. The unusual part of it has to do with the strange build-up that, like in the title song, stretches the build-up so slowly that the climax reaches its apex not before the very end of the track. 'La Piscine' has no structure at all. It meanders calmly through a mix of swimming pool noises and Satie-style piano musings. 'Lügen' combines environmental sounds with a swaying melody that has a definite free-jazz undertone and fades in pure static. 'Sonne Free' does the same with melodica, sax and invasive clicks and cuts. 'Dictaphone', the song, is populated with a dense variety of sounds that seem to emanate from self-made toys and a variety of old music boxes. A voice-sample from a french-spoken movie adds more dreamy disconnections that eventually break down in noisy disturbances, from which emerges a deep new-wave bass that evolves towards electro pop jazz ultra-lite. Many albums would suffer from such a load of references and ideas. But Dictaphone carefully keeps boredom out of the mix. 'Tango Doerell' is another hybrid case in point. This time we have disturbed glitch-tango with harmonica and castanets, paired with a dramatic string section. Far out! The rest of the album calmly verges between the haunting descriptiveness of good soundtrack music and the quiet, almost imperceptible abstractions of the click-tech movement. 'Outside (wird geistvoll gefickt)', for example, may be an intermezzo of under a minute, but even this miniature shows that by making music out of mere shreds of sound Dictaphone have a voice of their own. And it is a voice we @ volgaTowers have taken an instant liking to.