Mosaik 2014

We Say...

Review by Philip Sherburne

Despite its (just barely) futurist title, there's something almost quaint, or at least unassuming, about Kreidler's Mosaik 2014. The German "post-rock" band's first album in five years doesn't make any grand statements, either about the form or themselves: this doesn't sound like a band terribly worried about reminding the world of its relevance or even, particularly, in moving things "forward." These are midtempo instrumentals grounded in dub and Krautrock, not without a formal whiff of the easy-listening lounge grooves of a Kruder & Dorfmeister. The pulse is controlled, but alive: both rhythmic slippage and rubbery room tone point to "real" instruments in "real" space and time, a matrix whose shorthand is "rock 'n' roll." But synthesizers, electronic effects and the very fabric of the music itself always pulls the live-band fantasy back inside a different kind of logic: an ideal form mapped to an infinitesimally pixellated grid. It's hard to put your finger on, but you can feel it, and that's precisely what gives the record its charge: humans imitating machines imitating humans, or maybe the other way round.

But the music loosens up enough to look beyond itself, and the elemental grooves are just enough to hold your attention, even if they sometimes suggest more than they offer. The opening "Mosaik" has a healthy dose of classic Detroit techno, but it's not a tossed-off reference: the flickering synthesizer lead feels like one end of a conversation, the reply to a question posed a decade or more before by an artist like Carl Craig or Urban Tribe. "Brass Cannon" asks what would happen if electro broke out of its rigid timekeeping; "European Grey" revisits Kraftwerk's quest to find the aura in the era of mechanical (now digital) reproduction. And tracks like "Impressions d'Afrique" and "Luminous Procuress" are heavy, head-down investigations into timekeeping at its most elastic.