Designed to illustrate fellow artist Nicolás Guagnini‘s new video piece, ‘Porcelain and Volcano‘ makes for a rather special record in Salon des Amateurs Detlef Weinrich’s challenging catalogue. Det’s studies in sculpture at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts, his connection with the fine arts microcosm, all of this is of no surprise when you get to hear Tolouse Low Trax‘s distorted mechanics create their own cosmic order amid beaconed industrial grounds and unexplored experimental expanses.
Challenging the 4/4 paradigm with the kind of provocative stance that’s getting too rare these days, ‘Porcelain and Volcano‘ is way more than your umpteenth arty variation on a dogmatic, ultra-codified genre such as techno. Tolouse Low Trax carves shapeshifting audio organisms, following the marble swirls and veins rather than losing the pulse of its vital sap through any tempo diktat, each bar risking the integrity of its overall structure hence its naturalistic, freewheeling impression.
Leaning by turns towards musique concrète and shadow-crawling industrial rhythms, Weinrich coats his compositions with an occult aura, drifting from your average experimental catch-all with its propensity to withdraw any type of in-situ experience, rather much breaking rational time and space obstacles to offer a multi-dimensional and fully immersive venture away from floor action or simple living-room listening session. A logic of its own giving birth to a universe of its own.
It’s a demanding listen of course, one that asks for a lot of your attention as it keeps flirting with one’s comfort zone almost perversely. Still, from an apparently complex network of decayed sound ellipses, Tolouse Low Trax draws immediately riveting audio structures. As goes with any kind of game-changing art piece there’ll be resistance, surprise and puzzlement at times, but this is exactly what will make you get back to it with growing hunger.
Order a vinyl copy from Juno.
TRACKLIST
A. A Song And A Photo Novella
B. Late
Discover more about Tolouse Low Trax and Galerie Max Mayer Düsseldorf on Inverted Audio.