Music Out Of Place: Staubgold Records

"Music out of place" is the motto of the Staubgold label, and it couldn't have picked a better one. The Berlin-based imprint has no particular style, certainly nothing like a "sound," and its artists share no particular methodology. In the decade since Staubgold began publishing, it has released (just for starters) Institut Für Feinmotorik's "empty" turntablism, performed on record players prepared with masking tape and rubber bands; Juana Molina collaborator Alejandro Franov's Indian/African/Paraguayan folk fusion; and remixes sourced from FM3's much talked-about Buddha Machines — the small, mass-produced plastic boxes, originally designed to loop Buddhist mantras, that the Beijing-based duo repurposed to play their own dust-moted drones. In fewer than 80 releases so far, Staubgold has released glinting dub techno, children's music, drones both wispy and wildly physical and still more divergent approaches to the sound of music and the music of sound. And every release seems to bring still another strategy.

"Staubgold" means "gold dust," and I don't think it's a stretch to find something alchemical in the name. The label finds ways to take ideas and musical elements that might normally be considered "wrong," or just plain wrongheaded — whether the rubbed-balloon squawks and patch-cord crackle of Rafael Toral's Space, or the very concept of "children's music" — and make them worthy and musical. (I'll admit my surprise at discovering that the Childish Music compilation, far from making me want to tear my own fingernails out, actually had me making a mental list of friends with tykes who might benefit from a respite from Barney, or Thomas the Train, or whatever the hell is being peddled at the pre-pop set these days.)

Of course, the glitch is hardly a new concept for electronic music; Matthew Herbert has made an entire career out of exploiting mistakes (and lo and behold, he's here too, in his Dr. Rockit guise). But Staubgold sidesteps the all-too-common fetishization of the error by foregrounding music that needs no particular theory to back it up. (Nevertheless, the texts posted on Staubgold's own website to accompany its releases make for smart, engaging reading.)

With a reach as wide as Staubgold's, there's no single entry point, and even fans of the label may occasionally feel daunted by the range on offer. But for those needing a road map, Staubgold's catalog breaks down, very roughly, into three categories.

Electroacoustics
Much of my favorite Staubgold fare tracks what happens when acoustic or electric instruments — or samples of them — are run through the digital wringer. Andrew Pekler's sublime Strings + Feedback, for instance, processes string and piano samples, most of them reportedly taken from Morton Feldman's chamber work of the '50s, into structures at once delicate and surprisingly muscular, pitting pizzicato arpeggios against cascading dub delay and rubbing tones together until microtonal sparks fly. Ekkehard Ehlers' intimidatingly ambitious Plays, collecting the entirety of a vinyl-only series released between the Staubgold and Bottop-Boy labels, does something similar, only here Ehlers prefers to term his practice not sampling but "referencing," in a nod to the music's intended homages to cultural giants like Albert Ayler, John Cassavetes, Cornelius Cardew, Robert Johnson and Hubert Fichte. You may not always (or ever) determine the link between the music and its subject, but the album remains an engrossing listen — perhaps all the more so for its relative indecipherability.

For its title and cover photograph — featuring a man wearing a t-shirt adorned with New York's World Trade Center, pre-destruction — Ehlers' Politik Braucht Keinen Feind might seem no less forbidding, but its swirls of bass clarinet and cello are as easy on the ears as "art music" can be. Ehler's trio work with guitarist Joseph Suchy and trumpeter Franz Hautzinger is no less essential, tracing ephemeral gestures as they vaporize into clusters of overtones — proof that the oft-maligned category of "improv" can be unabashedly gorgeous.

Ehlers' work has received plenty of attention, thanks in no small part to his role in the jawdropping folk/pop/electronic group März, alongside Albrecht Kunze. But one of the pleasures of Staubgold's catalog is that it continually yields hidden gems from less heralded artists. One of these is Paul Wirkus. His group the September Collective (also featuring Barbara Morgenstern and To Rococo Rot's Stefan Schneider) was responsible for one of 2007's finest albums, the unpredictable and absorbing All the Birds Were Anarchists, and you can hear echoes of his contribution there in Déformation Professionelle, a slowly drifting procession of loops and samples performed upon MiniDisc players and recorded live to DAT.

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Talk about "music out of place": the fingerpicking and chord changes on "Smile" are more or less explicit quotations of Nick Drake.

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Post-Rock and Avant-Pop
While so much electronic music remains a solo activity, there's no shortage of ensemble playing on Staubgold, and much of it translates (ever so loosely) into something approaching a rock idiom, whether it's the recent work by chamber/ethnic/folk jazzists Kammerflimmer Kollektief or proto-post-rockers Faust. Two of my favorite kinda-sorta-rock releases on the label come from New Zealand percussionist and jack-of-all-trades Dean Roberts, formerly of the groups Thela and White Winged Moth. His album And the Black Moths Play the Grand Cinema, originally released on the Force Inc. imprint Ritornell, is every bit as evocative as its title; featuring contributions from Tim Barnes, Charles Curtis and Matt Valentine, it combines fluttering percussion, hazy drones, and sheets of metallic sound with halting vocals pushed far back in the mix; at its best, as on "You and the Devil Blues," it represents a continuation of the line of investigation that Talk Talk abandoned when they quit recording. Roberts' group Autistic Daughters, featuring Martin Brandlmayer (Radian, Trapist) and Polwechsel's Werner Dafeldecker, and mastered by techno prodigy Patrick Pulsinger, follows in the Talk Talk lineage, capturing the essence of pop songcraft just at the moment of its dissolution.

The list of daring, post-everything (apologies to the Leaf Label) Staubgold acts both combo and solo goes on and on — there's Thilges, To Rococo Rot, F.S. Blumm, Wechsel Garland & World Standard — but I have to single out Sun as one of the finest. This recent album is the work of Chris Townend and Oren Ambarchi — don't sleep on his collaborations with guitarist Keith Rowe and turntablist Martin Ng, either — and it finds the duo exploring an acoustic pop landscape that's impossible not to fall in love with on first listen. Like all worthy romances, it just keeps opening up over time. Talk about "music out of place": the fingerpicking and chord changes on "Smile" are more or less explicit quotations of Nick Drake, hardly the first reference that comes to mind when you think of Staubgold.

Out of This World
Finally, a crucial corner of Staubgold is reserved for those artists who can only be said to be doing their own weird thing. Harald Sack Ziegler, whose Punkt is confusingly classified as "Comedy" on eMusic, is certainly one of these: the album, compiled from out-of-print vinyl and cassette releases, is an assemblage of lo-fi garage rock jams, lower-fi schlager pop, and echoes of the Neue Deutsche Welle (German New Wave) movement of the '80s, complete with whistling, yelping, and thoroughly absurdist lyrics. (If you're not sure how much stomach you have for that sort of thing, fear not: most of the songs are only a minute or so long.)

Reuber shares little in common with Ziegler, besides a desire to do whatever he damned well pleases. Sadly, his masterful album Ruhig Blut isn't currently available on eMusic; that record, with its 20-plus minutes of electric ping-pong repetition, might just rank among my all-time Desert Island Discs. (I own one copy on CD and two on vinyl, and in several unbridled DJ sets over the years, I've played all three copies at once, letting them slip slowly out of phase.) Fortunately, he's no slouch on Kintopp and Südpol, which pursue the strategy of spring-loaded arpeggios and overdriven delay. There are also balm-like drones ("Dominique-B"), melting dial tones ("Tausendnadelwind"), and even lo-fi approximations of ecstatic, hands-in-the-air rave anthems ("Nach Vorn"). I doubt Reuber will ever become a superstar in this century, but listening to the imaginative leaps and euphoric peaks attained in his small body of work, it's not hard to imagine future musicians building entire genres upon the foundations he's laid. You could say the same for Staubgold as a whole: there's a vast world of music here, and the label's the passport to entry. "Out of place" is the place.