If you were to entrust a producer to make an album containing all the right noises, Roman Flügel would likely feature high on the list to deliver. A stalwart from the days of Frankfurt’s legendary Omen club, Flügel’s productions have flirted with pop techno as Alter Ego (in cahoots with Jörn Elling Wuttke), brutalist techno wallop under various pseudonyms and wonky micro-house, much of which can be found on the brilliant Playhouse label he co-founded with Wuttke.
There was a point where his productions took ominous turns but, thankfully, Flügel mostly exists in the space that suits him best – subtle, playful and melodic. His previous album ‘Happiness is Happening’ was a joy in this respect, no less summed up by the timeless ‘Wilkie‘.
With a brave title like ‘All The Right Noises‘, his third album for Dial should be hitting ‘All The Right Buttons‘. The good news is that after, at least, twenty listens we’ve struggled to detect a wrong noise. All of it seems very right indeed. It’s so right that we think this is likely Flügel’s best work yet.
However, sound is a subjective thing, so we decided to seek professional advice on whether this album really does live up to its moniker. Dr Edmund Blauthorpe is a made up Professor Emeritus of Electronic Music & Acoustics at UCLA and we asked him to listen and comment on whether the noises within are, indeed, the right ones.
"With a brave title like 'All The Right Noises', his third album for Dial should be hitting 'All The Right Buttons'. The good news is that after, at least, twenty listens we've struggled to detect a wrong noise."
“There are three ways we can test this type of claim”, says Blauthorpe. “The first is to subject the sounds to rigorous lab tests – oscilloscopes, spectrum analysers and various bio & psycho-acoustic experiments. The second is playback and questions to a large group of my own students and the third is to seek advice from the owner of a pair of ‘golden ears’.”
“We ran the lab tests across a week and every experiment came back with a conclusive ‘yes’ – these noises are all certainly right. Each vibration, tonal quality, timbre, the equalisation, the placement of sounds across the frequency range plus every psycho-acoustic property measured were proven to be precisely…right.”
“Some of my students have seen Flügel DJ and were surprised to initially find the music unusually demure. However, across numerous playbacks through extremely high end audiophile systems the response was, again, unanimous. Not only did every single element of this album sound right, they also remarked on its subtle beauty, coherent track sequencing and intelligent off kilter pattern combinations. They discussed at length how Flügel achieves such depth and emotion via a relatively sparse palette of sounds – “Dust” and “Warm and Dewy” were particular favourites for them.”
“Finally the “golden ears” test. We managed to secure a number of golden eared people, many of whom can distinguish between 24 & 16 bit audio files just by listening to them. They too were highly complimentary about ‘All The Right Noises’ – even the infamously indignant Chavierre ‘Orielles’ Pitchfork was seen nodding in approval and gave this an 8.4 / 10.”
“All in all, this is a remarkable collection of beautifully transmitted waves of pressure and time, simply extraordinary sound waves…..just wonderful’ concludes Blauthorpe.
Well, OK – we made all that stuff up but you get the picture. And why are you still reading this anyway? You should be approaching your favourite music emporium with immediate haste and making All The Right Noises a part of your collection. We can almost guarantee a lifetime of pleasure from this one.
All The Right Noises is released 28th October 2016 on Dial. Head back here tomorrow (28th October) for a full stream of the album. Order a copy from Kompakt.
Photo by Nadine Fraczkowski
TRACKLIST
1. Fantasy
2. The Mighty Suns
3. Dead Idols
4. Nameless Lake
5. Warm and Dewy
6. Dust
7. Believers
8. All The Right Noises
9. Planet Zorg
10. Life Tends To Come And Go
Discover more about Roman Flügel and Dial on Inverted Audio.