Thomas Fehlmann, the Swiss-born, Berlin-based legend teams up with director/animator Sveta Rybkina (modellogia) for an alluring audiovisual journey, a garden in both the literal and imaginative sense.
Did you ever, as a kid, get lost in spirals of doodled lines, desperately trying to draw the visuals unfolding in your mind? Watching this video recalls that sort of fancy. In delicate hand-drawn shapes, you get exquisite, pulsing forms that coil and vibrate with the organic life of a timelapse of ferns growing. modellogia’s collaborations with Oval and others have earned a deserved place onstage and in the short film circuit.
It’s the perfect accompaniment to Thomas’ track, an addictive fascination of finely composed minimal pops and thuds. The gentle groove is formed out of field recordings in the countryside outside Berlin – “Sound, Wind, and Love!” in the words of the artist. (The track emerged on Umdrehen, out on Edition Dur / KulturManufaktur / Dussmann DUR14 last fall. There’s a beautiful push and pull to the track’s shuffling rhythm – dragging field recordings and groaning pads, against the insistence of the low kick and exclamatory percussion. It’s hard not to immediately put it on again the moment it ends, and start to listen even more closely to some of the complexity of those dissonant patterns of drops. (If you would isolate just those Maxwell House-style pops, in all their atonal asymmetrical rhythms, you almost have a vintage acousmatic composition. But it exudes the typical wit and coyness that marks Fehlmann’s inventive charisma.)
Fehlmann, apart from the whole, uh, The Orb thing, embodies to me what made Berlin interesting in the first place – not looking inward, but outward. It wasn’t only his vision but also the artists he brought in from elsewhere – from Juan Atkins to Latinx artists. And somehow you do still hear that in this track – curiosity. I hope we all constantly renew that spirit, and that child mind.
Wow, spotted this from 2004…