Baustelle

Album Review

Baustelle is German for "construction site," and it's an apt title for this album on a couple of levels. For one thing, the music itself is quite explicitly a construction made up of a blend of organically created and pre-existing materials: the West/East German duo of Gudrun Gut and Antye Greie have put together their own beats and vocals and combined them with ingenious samples. Then there are the samples themselves, many of which were boiled down from hours of field recordings made at construction sites. Those sounds appear in a wild variety of forms on this album, and are not always clearly recognizable: they provide ambient texture on the jittery "Wir Bauen ein Neue Stadt" ("We Are Building a New City") and on the creepily dubwise "Drilling an Ocean," whereas they seem to form most of the musical environment on the deep house excursion "Mischmaschine" and the grumbling, rhythmically complex industrialism of "Grossgrundbesitzer." The music ends up being something of an aural Rorschach test: if you love Krautrock, you'll hear it; if you want experimental dub, glitch, tech-house, death-ambient, industrial, or avant-electro, you'll hear those as well. Adventurous without being especially confrontational, and sonically assertive without ever sounding aggressive, Baustelle is a fascinating and sometimes pleasantly befuddling listening experience.