Schneider TM, Ereignishorizont, Germany, Karlrecords, KR104 CD / 2 x vinyl LP (2023)
At nearly 21 minutes in length, the title track, meaning “Event Horizon” in German, really deserves its own CD and (well) mini LP versions: there’s so much happening in it, what with various treatments of customised electro-acoustic guitars attached to unusual pickups and links to other sound sources, along with the strange galloping rhythms and beats, and various bubbly sounds, that once it ends you can barely face the next 60+ minutes of whatever the next seven tracks hit you with. As “Ereignishorizont” (the track) bubbles away, the searing guitar tones and other effects become very more intense and confronting, until you can almost feel your face burning and your hair about to catch fire any minute. At some point past the halfway mark, the music becomes completely ballistic and floats off into the high atmosphere to roam over the clouds and into zones of high solar radiation as a string of sound and rhythm fragments for the next several minutes.
With “Schwarzschild-Radius”, we are now properly in space, with sonic flotsam and jetsam in orbit around Earth, and a rather forbidding mood present in the ambient warbling tones. It uses some of the same sounds as the title track and has a rather menacing, threatening feel, but for its length it’s rather monotonous and could have had quite a few minutes subtracted from its playing time without much loss in mood and style.
Much of the rest of the album consists of guitar-based improvisations resulting in what can be imagined as a series of tourist snapshots of a futuristic urban alien society, perhaps on Earth or elsewhere, in which humans may not even be among the various species inhabiting fantastically designed sculptured buildings or zipping past skyscrapers in airborne vehicles. Whether the music sounds like demented psychedelic guitar drone hellscapes, strings of popping bubble, industrial ghost dub or videogame soundtrack music of a dark industrial ambient bent, what is present in most if not all these tracks is a sense of curiosity and adventure, seeing how far the music can go in new directions and territories, and take its audiences with it. Even a track like “Austritt”, which has a strong sense of impending doom and ominous menace behind its crumbling distorted sounds and rising hysteria, still retains a feeling of wonder. You can’t help but feel that behind what appears to be oncoming chaos and destruction, may be a portal to another wondrous universe.
“Ereignishorizont” (the album) really does come across as a soundtrack for an ambitious and epic sci-fi film or television series; at nearly 90 minutes it’s more or less complete in itself as a background music work and all that’s needed is a script of equal if not more ambition in its plotting and vision of a future complex urban society with the technology to match. The man behind Schneider TM (Dirk Dresselhaus) can be proud of the work he has done here.