Ignaz Schick / Oliver Steidle
ILOG3
GERMANY ZAREK 24 CD
2021 recordings made in a Berlin studio by Schick (turntables, sampler, pitch shifter and looper) with Steidle (drums, sampler, electronics). In cover design this is quite similar to its sister release ILOG2, except this time it’s magenta letters on a blue field.
A brief glimpse at the track titles may indicate what was on the minds of these two restless creators while they were performing, with references to communication and lack of same (one missing channel), uncertain futures, melancholy, and “blurred positives”. If they are pessimistic about the prospects for the human race on planet Earth, they hint at a number of strategies for how to redeem the situation, ranging from ‘Cycling Flow’ to ‘Transition & Grip’, the latter sounding like a very pro-active approach which should serve everyone engaged in high-profile IT projects or consortial business schemes. Indeed “pro-active” might be the watchword for these two engaged improvisers when the energy-drinks start to kick in and the wild percussive beats scurry about the room like so many enriched crabs with antlers skating on friction motors.
I seem to recall that earlier record was also minded to make plain the love that both musicians have for dancefloor and trip-hop expeditions, a boast on which they continue to make good, now adding bizarre and perplexing vocal elements fished from the ponds of soundfiles one of them has stored on their roaming digital device, a virtual folder so replete with data that even Microsoft refuse to accommodate it on their cloud servers. These vocals, some of them so preposterous as to appear almost humorous and Goon-show like in their varispeeded absurdity, do a lot to root this otherwise abstract music in some form of reality, albeit a rather grotesque one. Meanwhile the intense, hyper-busy surfaces of most of the music here can be exhausting to listen to in one sitting; amazing that they had enough energy to produce it all in just two days of working.
Ignaz Schick and Oliver Steidle have been playing together since 2013, and it’s fair to assume they know each other’s nooks and bridles to the extent that they can almost communicate by telepathy, or through using virtual paper darts, a new technology they’re working on to replace BlueTooth. From February 2024.