Roland Schappert arrives from Cologne with his debut album Route1 (R-ECORDS) – we’ve been dilatory keeping up with him, since he’s already put out Route2 for the same label. Schappert comes to us from his background in visual art – in his images, he’s aiming for a mixture or synthesis of everything from text, art, graphic design and video art, by way of poetry and essays, and he uses the techniques of layering and superimposition of all of these, erasing and degrading the sources as needed. In a 2014-15 exhibition of his, he “explores crucial questions of collecting and conservation as well as selection and valuation”, we are informed.
I mention all this as it might apply to Route1, perhaps his first foray into making music. It’s electronic, I guess, but he also puts in field recordings in among his bleeping sounds, his drifting tones, and his unpredictable keyboard stabs. There’s a declared effort to mix things up – using different styles, a “broad spectrum” of sounds, in an attempt to surprise our expectations. Limp, lukewarm fare is all he’s able to dish out from his cauldron of post-modern soup; I understand about the desire to “meander” freely among stylistic templates, but all I’m feeling here is a severe lack of compositional organisation. He can’t settle on one sound, one style, one melody, and keeps changing his tack or running out of steam before a single half-baked idea is allowed to develop. None of his sounds are especially interesting, or new; there’s nothing to engage the listener. His attempts at lyrical content – such as the solemn intoning of “love-making….love-making” on the track ‘Val d’Ultimo’ – are stilted and clumsy.
The cover artworks – including Schappert’s photographs and designed by him – suggest an unprepared traveller wandering through a forest without a map, treating everything he encounters as a sign of equal value. A very poor first effort from a mediocre artist. (14/04/2022)