“Welcome to the unexpected world of sounds and tones of one the most pleasant surprises this year; The Heisenberg Compensators”
1 Inner 5:38 2 Clearing 8:16 3 Gales 7:55 4 Question 5:33 5 Glory 7:14 6 Stroke 6:05 7 Dust 5:16 8 Dice 6:39 Groove Unlimited | GR-1003
(CD-R 52:36) (V.F.) (E-Rock in a world of glitch, white noises and ...What the heck!)
The Heisenberg Compensators is a project that saw the light of day within the framework of the Glow festival. A festival of lights which is held each year in the city of Eindhoven in Holland. For this opportunity, Allard Krijger, guitarist of FRAKnoise, and Stefan Robbers, the keyboard player and synthesist of Eevolute and of Terrace, delivered a performance based on the improvisation during the festival of 2012. Following the excellent reception of the public, the duet has decided to pursue the adventure. Having been conquered by the capacities of the synth Modular Virus, Stefan Robbers suggested to create ambient music. One thing leading to another, and with the addition of other components as well as instruments forged and conceived by them, The Heisenberg Compensators, thus named after the work of the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, took shape. After a first sketch in sounds, either an album which was never released but which served as blueprint for ADVENTURES of WERNER and RANDOM, The Heisenberg Compensators was ready to meet the conditions of a public consumer of contemporary EM. And let's see how's that sounds…
Rather melancholic, Inner gets between our ears with a rather melodious guitar. Its notes, a kind of Flamingo for electronic souls, pour into a universe veiled by a blanket of synth layers in mode obstruction for ears and by good resonant, heavy and slow strikes of electronic percussions. It's very good and it flows up until the more acoustic introduction of Clearing which so reminds of old Pink Floyd. There is a metronome behind this wall of tones, as well as these too translucent electronic noises to be just white noises, which clocks a light hypnotic tempo. Pulsations, always in mode bitonality, are shaking a little our phase of bewitchment a little after the bar of 120 seconds, while Clearing derives slowly towards a structure difficult to identify, let’s put that we strum of the fingers with a taste to remain semi awake, where Allard Krijger's guitar gives me the taste to listen to Michael Rother. Very comfortable with a panoply of tones which dither between the known and the unknown, Allard Krijger and Stefan Robbers tame our ears with a good pallet of the genres in a sonic envelope which sometimes challenges the imagination. Sounds which stretch out into iridescent lines and which weakens their magic in the hopping and very Schroeder rhythm, except for the slip at the end of the ambient race, of Gales. With its beat a little Cosmic Funk, Glory is the title which gets closer the most to Robert Schroeder repertoire. The sequencer is very effective here.
It's in vapors of white noises and of hums of pensive ectoplasms' that rushes forward the rhythm panting of Question. The pace increases appreciably to slip downright in spasms which pound nervously under a sonic sky multicolored of shrill streaks. Very intense and atypical, Question is the only drawback of an album all the same rather attractive. Well, in my case! Stroke offers a more ambient, but noisier, structure with some delicious disorders in the effects of the percussions which do not seem to disrupt the placidity of the loops treatments and the effects of guitar which in the end weakens its charms underneath thick layers of milky mist. The rhythm gets more vigor in the middle where Stroke becomes clearly more musical even with these effects of beyond the grave. And always this hammer which tinkers we don't know what! Dust is lively, nervous with its loops which roll non-stop with keen oscillations. This is good E-Rock with a touch of old Neu!. One could say the same thing of Dice, but the Indus side makes of it a music which holds right in the middle of Electronica for Cybernetic zombies and Techno Pop a la sauce Düsseldorf with its Motorik approach. Fascinating, sometimes uneasy but surely splendid!
Such is and as a first album, The Heisenberg Compensators touches more or less everything in a too old sound envelope to be psybient and too rich to be only a facade for ambient music. The static and ectoplasmic noises are of an incredible wealth and divert very easily our ears of a beautiful variant of electronic rhythms. Contrary to what one could think, the loops and treatments of guitars are not so omnipresent to the point to undo the charms of a whimsical EM which feed of its multiple elements in a symbiosis between the noise and the harmony which fascinates. ADVENTURES of WERNER and RANDOM is a nice voyage in time, but not as far as that, where the music again dared to be a surprise.
Sylvain Lupari (March 9th, 2017) *****
Available at Groove NL