Moody and trippy with overtones of jazz and electronic noise manages to evoke lots of different images. Anchored by a solid bass, the music moves through a series of subtle emotions evoking all types of colors. Jazzy, electronic, ambient-all those things in one serious package.
From Pitchfork review of Wilding:
This is cerebral, subtle music. There are few obvious climaxes. The conglomerated style feels balanced, because everyone plays their role sensitively. Double bassist Johannes Frisch provides a rock-solid jazz foundation for the movements, shifting between deep grooves and deft extemporization. Guitarist Thomas Weber provides a lot of the 1970s experimental and cinematic feel, simultaneously handling woozy but hard-flecked guitars and electronic textures. Heike Aumüller provides the personality and humanizing voice, either sitting at her harmonium, or hunkering down on the floor with a flute or synthesizer. Drummer Christopher Brunner is adroit and feather-light. No one ever flies off on their own trip; all play tactfully and with a sense of the overriding structure.
The scary mannequin-creature from the cover of 2007's Jinx makes a return appearance here, now with its dress pulled down ominously. Fans of that record will find themselves right at home, as KK has always stressed gradual refinement over sudden left turns: The music is mannered, restrained, redolent of 70s exotica; the vocals are cool and remote but essentially passionate. Aumüller coos like an out-music ice-diva amid the slow bluster of "Move Right In" as the guitar bends like cold starlight around the thumping double bass. "I feel lightheaded," she sings on "Aum A-Go-Go", against a backdrop of xylophone and metallically textured ringlets. But you'd never guess it from her utterly composed delivery, which sounds low-key even when chopped into a blur during the song's conclusion. She sings in a weird, sometimes incomprehensible English that conveys just fine-- you can tell that "Spookin' the Horse" is a love song, just from how the voice plays against the big swoony guitar chords. Regardless of whether it sounds like melted indie rock or coiling jazz, each song has a mysterious, soulful pulse to follow, always just out of reach. The record eschews highs and lows for a steady, seductive purr.
Review of Wilding at Junkmedia:
If psychedelia is, in a very important aspect, about finding a ‘world’ and a community in alienation, it also opens up the (depending on your point of view, perhaps dangerous) potential to find nothing, the clear possibility of getting lost in a miasma of hallucination and ethereal haunts. If both ways lead to their own special forms of transcendence, it’s pretty safe to say that the second version might be even more powerful than the first; to find a world within another is to confine oneself to a new comfortable reality that denies the previous one as isolation kicks in, while to find nothingness in oneself provokes direct confrontation with the reality already given, forcing the person into perpetual ‘traveler’ status, a constant delirium of the world where the map and the body is forever in flux. Finding ‘civilization’ unnecessary, one then becomes a Wildling.
The slowed down, almost trip-hoppy environment of German post-jazzers (or should I say primordial, Sun Cycle pre-jazzers?) Kammerflimmer Kollektief unravels the world in multi-linear manners, opening the mind up to the determinist presence of dreams within our ever-so-scientific reality, taking snapshots akin to the band’s usual album art in which surrealist juxtaposition drives our faces literally blank. Our bodies are severely forced into displacement from any and all context, the context itself woven just like history: a series of incongruent events tailored into fragmented, forever incomplete narratives. The electronic muffled wails of krautrock serve as background, a background that practically drones on and on as a soft feminine voice whispers its song in words that are not ours to understand, for there is no ‘understanding’ to be effected here, only pure experience, surrealist words-as-sound and Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble-styled noisy moments of quietude.
Kammerflimmer Kollektief Website
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