Schnellertollermeier - Rights
SKU
Rune 442
Manuel Troller - guitar & effects
Andi Schnellmann - electric bass & effects
David Meier - drums
"Schnellertollermeier have developed an approach to music where distinctions between conventionally marked terrains -- heavy metal, post-rock, prog, electric jazz, new music, improvisation, noise, modern composition, etc. -- meet in one place...and vanish. In their place is a music that is aggressive (at times brutal), wildly ambitious, and indefinable by common standards." – All Music Guide
Clarity. Dedication. Skill. These aren’t really qualities that define our time. All too often, our ephemeral reality finds itself reflected in a jittery retro-music that sucks its data from the Cloud – that atomised archive accessible to all.
Schnellertollermeier’s fourth album is their reply to all this: Rights, and it offers ample demonstration of their own clarity and ability. Rights comprises four pieces, every one of them inscribed with radicalism. Each is built on just a few ideas and develops out of them until it sounds like a Cubist work of art that seems to gaze out from the most varied of perspectives, but always in the same direction. This is the key to the immense depth and beauty of this album. Apart from the fact that it simply blows you away.
The band has an immense presence – that’s the first thing you notice. Initially, you only hear concise, repetitive patterns, but you can already feel their powerful performing energy, their will to play out and not to yield to any ceremonial, reductionist modes. The pressure is high, their concentration levels too, and their energy levels aren’t a sudden spasm but a prerequisite. This music is complex, but never so much so that the band couldn’t play it with something in reserve. That keeps their music open and free – also for those who hear it. Schnellertollermeier is never just brash. They regulate the intensity of their sound with the highly controlled nuances of a precision engineer handling thumbscrews. They never discharge an impertinent punch – instead it’s outstretched, held out, and offered up.
It is also worth noting how immediately apparent it is upon hearing Rights little it sounds like improvised music or “jazz”. In their other bands, Schnellmann, Troller and Meier still regularly play that kind of music with abandon. There are no solos here, no showing-off, for their sound remains that of a straight- up-and-down band. They move through minimal patterns and ambient zones, they build up into brutal rock and arrive more than once on the dancefloor with a kind of nimble, danceable headbanger music.
It is astonishing how natural it all sounds. How little it sounds like crossover music or some other mind game. This is not least because the band constructs each of its pieces from the bottom up, using one or two clearly defined motives that remain throughout and leave their mark on the piece. Every note has its function, every element is the prerequisite for the next. These pieces are long, but they aren’t suites. Instead, the band members asked themselves: what form will emerge if we take a single idea, think it through consistently, and play it? The electric sound of the guitar has already been composed “into” these electronic textures right from the start. Brutal backbeats rise up out of the serial structure and are expanded and radicalised by the band. Riffs push the tracks over the edge, but then open up for drones and overtone concerts; then they draw themselves in again and push the piece onto the next level.
This works because Schnellmann, Troller and Meier are not jazz musicians simply kowtowing before rock music and refining it. They belong to a generation that grew up with grunge, hip-hop and electronic club music, and they learnt it all by osmosis. If Schnellertollermeier is able to hold its own at jazz festivals from Willisau to Moers and Cheltenham as well as in rock and metal clubs or at a festival of contemporary music, then it’s because they know what they’re playing. They know it, and they believe in it. You can call this clarity; or you can call it skill. Or attitude.
- LabelCuneiform
- UPC045775044224