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CD Feature/ Asmus Tietchens: "Geboren, um zu dienen"

  Tobias

With a monumental monograph just out and releases on an almost daily basis on some of the most renowned experimental labels worldwide, one must come to the conclusion that Asmus Tietchens has reached the pinacle of his career. From an economic and medial point of view, that is. For this man has already been an active and prominent member of the music scene since the 1960s, as his homepage proudly states and his discography impressingly proves. Part of this interest can be traced back to Hamburg-based label “Die Stadt”, who have sparked renewed interest in Tietchen’s output of the 80s, a phase which saw him try on a plethora of styles and laid the ground for his idiosyncratic minimalist adventures of the last few years.

“Geboren, um zu dienen” already marks the 8th episode in this ongoing series of transfers from Vinyl to CD and harks back to the year 1986, when Tietchens turned his fascination for industrial culture into a fully-fledged album. As “Vital Weekly”’s Frans de Waard mentioned, these were the dying days of a genre, but as most will know, quite often these are the most exciting of times. What this record perfectly documents is the splintered character typical of these years, with the original ideal phasing out into all directions. While legendary Spanish outfit Esplendor Geometrico, on whose label the first pressing was released, came to discover the dancefloor, sucking a host of other acts and newcomers with them into an entirely new niche, others destilled a sense of beauty from the initially brutal sounds. Tietchens was one of the latter. His effort stresses the incredible opportunities industrial music offered and further explores the “terra incognita” deep into the moisty forrests of the mainland. “Geboren, um zu dienen” (“Born to serve”) uses skeletized beats, machinoidly cold and bony, but breathes new life and an artificial intelligence into them – in stark contrast to the metronomic poundings of the 4/4 bass drum, these turned and twisted rhythmical echoes move in their own tempo, sometimes stuttering and regularly shifting in accentuation and focus. And underneath the icy surface, a whole world of emotions rears its head – choral mysteries, vague harmonies, majestic motives, whispered promises and enervating little melodies. It is almost as if the outer shell, which inevitably marks this music as “industrial” merely serves as a distraction, a gateway to discover the magic of the underlying streams.

This edition comes with three bonus tracks, all of which are of equal quality and in the same train of thought. Surprisingly catchy, they make for an agreeable departure from the almost routinely depressed utterings of the genre’s pioneers  – the tone of the album may be harsh, but its ideology is never nihilistic. Which makes this a highly listenable record full of immediate hooks and plenty of trap doors for further discovery.

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: Die Stadt Records
Homepage: Asmus Tietchens