Image courtesy LEITER records
F.S. Blumm and Nils Frahm are no strangers to collaboration. The renowned German experimentalists have consistently returned to each other time and again, feeding off one another’s respective points of view to produce increasingly mind-bending records. Though, it’s not hard to imagine the meeting of such creative heavyweights comes with a fair share of obsession and strives towards perfectionism. This is likely the case with their fourth collaborative album, 2X1=4 which is due for release on September 3rd via Frahm’s new label, LEITER. The pair have been working away on this record since 2016, the same year that saw them release their previous joint effort Tag Eins Tag Zwei. Desert Mule arrives as the first taste of this new chapter in their partnership, and sees Blumm and Frahm apply their jazzy abstractions and scholarly syncopation to the landscape of dub.
Dub, surprisingly, suits Blumm and Frahm particularly well. Their jazz avant-gardism takes fresh form when applied to the genre’s characteristically trippy and atmospheric sound. It makes sense, considering dub is a genre which in its own right produces electronic sound sculptures through echo and reverb. Blumm and Frahm’s usual output is largely intentional, processed sound sculptures that have been meticulously designed. Even the improvisations of Tag Eins Tag Zwei felt carefully considered in their approach. Dub allows Blumm and Frahm an ease to their production that feels far less uptight. Desert Mule is likely the most outwardly psychedelic record the two have ever released together. It’s a warping slow burner accented by intoxicated guitar plucks and a trippy bass line around which sliding strings add to the haze. Across its five minutes, Desert Mule languidly ebbs and flows through distortions and stacked reverb effects, arriving at a sanctimonious choral outro. Blumm and Frahm mostly stick to the dub’s traditional structure of dub, moving through sections of layered echoes towards sections of quick rhythm. It’s interesting to consider that this music was obsessed over for the past four years, and leads to wondering if that’s how long it’s taken these two to figure out how to unwind into something more laidback. Yet for all it’s ease and languor, if you sit with Desert Mule long enough you will come to see that it is still fairly considered. The placement of each section, the sequence of reverberations bleeding into and out of each other; all these elements suggest Desert Mule as an intense study into dub as form and modality by two of music’s most obsessively abstract minds.
Watch the music video for Desert Mule below, and pre-order 2X1=4 here.
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