Polonius – ‘Antique Marvel’
Polonius -—icon of holistic nether-music, mysterious one-man anti-band– assembles a far-reaching sonic universe on Antique Marvel. His songs are dense, immersive habitats: rhythms and pitches flutter and repeat like animal calls; ambience shifts like primordial mist. The album evolves as a series of phonic environments that feel at once ancient and techno-futuristic. Pre-lingual chants cradle the glint of space-age electronics, occult intonations are lit with the cheap light of a karaoke machine. Polonius commands a menagerie of tape loops and audio-bites that congeal as melodic ecosystems and disperse into tonal miasma. Antique Marvel assembles selections from the elusive Antique Fantasia suite, some of which already circulates quietly through freakier channels of the global subterranean; other parts remain as-yet unreleased. Consider this tape a speculative survey -— a future anthology that recollects the not-yet-heard. These are the conjurer’s most spellbinding articulations, sequenced across space-time.
Die Welttraumforscher – ‘Die Lieder: 1981, 1983, 1986’
Die Lieder compiles early recordings by Die Welttraumforscher, the audio-visual avatar of Swiss native Christian Pfluger. Pfluger has spent the last thirty years refining a curious brand of hypnotic, experimental pop. His discography plots the story of the “world dream researchers”—benevolent aliens who visit Earth and deposit clues to an enlightened intergalactic culture. Each album cultivates this core mythology with new lyrical episodes, sonic excursions, and Pfluger’s pen and ink illustrations. Side A of Die Lieder presents selections from Vanidras Kult (1981) and Reise Nach Bretzelberg (1983). These are Pfluger’s earliest albums, made up of dreamy vignettes that fuse toy keyboards and lo-fi atmospherics. They are the cream of first-wave bedroom messthetics, with an eerie acoustic ambience equally at home among the more cosmic folk revivalists. Side B presents selections from the legendary Binika (1986) and ends with the pop masterpiece This Could be the Greatest Love in Town. Here, Die Welttraumforscher shifts toward bona-fide synth-pop, equal parts casio minimalism and lush, stumbling balladry. The tape includes an accordion booklet with liner notes by Pfluger -— reminiscences delivered with an endearing, casual sincerity. As much for die-hard Welttraum-heads as for the uninitiated, Die Lieder is a singular journey through Pfluger’s emergent musical cosmos and the early years of the Swiss bedroom underground.