(Kompakt)
House producers Marcus Worgull and Danilo Plessow's hotly awaited collaboration is idiosyncratic, varied, beautifully nuanced and compelling
You could infer quite a lot about Vermont from some of the titles on their debut album, particularly Rückzug and Übersprung. They respectively translate as "retreat" and "breakaway". On one level, they're words that fit with the mood of an album that also features tracks named after a region of Lanzarote and a North African desert wind. But they seem to tell you something, too, about the Vermont project itself.
Its two collaborators, Marcus Worgull and Danilo Plessow, are hugely well-respected house producers. The former is part of the Berlin based Innervisions collective, famed for a perfectionism that's led him to release only six singles in 13 years. Plessow, meanwhile, is the youthful, rather waif-like figure behind Motor City Drum Ensemble, a name that puns on dance music and Plessow's obsession with Detroit, while hymning his hometown of Stuttgart, where Mercedes-Benz and Porsche are based. His speciality is a Moodymann-influenced brand of deep house, in which the four-to-the-floor beats are overlaid with dusty soul samples and live keyboards to often strangely eerie effect. Both have been widely acclaimed and their collaboration has been hotly anticipated, but Vermont's eponymous album has virtually no connection with house at all. There are only a couple of moments where you think a 120bpm kick drum could be about to burst in: on Übersprung, an exquisitely mournful string arrangement appears instead, and ushers the track firmly away from the dancefloor.
Publicity for Vermont has bandied the phrase "Krautrock" around and drawn attention both to the guest appearance on the album of Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit and the fact that its 14 tracks came from lengthy jam sessions. Furthermore, you might note that Rückzug's title sounds suspiciously like a knowing nod towards that of Ruckzuck, the opening number on Kraftwerk's 1970 debut. Keen ears might find it possible to detect a faint echo of the latter track's warping, percussive flute part in one of Rückzug's synth lines. For the most part, however, the 70s German antecedents for the music on Vermont don't lie in Kraftwerk's pre-Autobahn experiments, Can's loose-limbed avant-funk or, indeed the taut motorik rhythms of Neu!, but the becalmed electronics found on Harmonia's Ahoi! – the kind of primitive drum machine that powered their debut album, Muzik von Harmonia, crops up on a couple of occasions – or Cluster's Es War Einmal.
Reading on mobile? Listen to samples from Vermont on Soundcloud here
Indeed, the album feels far more eclectic than the Krautrock tag might suggest. There are moments so sun-kissed and blissed-out that they would once have been labelled with the adjective Balearic, while the treated guitar sounds of Sharav wouldn't sound wildly out of place on Brian Eno's Another Green World. Elsewhere, the album's proliferation of languid electric piano lines brings to mind Air circa Casanova 70, with the louche easy-listening influences replaced by more austere electronics.
That austerity might be the key to Vermont's success. As anyone who remembers the glut of late 90s chill-out compilations and tepid wave of bands who came in Air's wake will attest, there's a thin line between making music that sounds sublime and weightless and making music that just sounds lightweight. But as delightful as it is to bask in the warm glow of a track such as Rückzug, the music on Vermont is frequently more complex and ambiguous than that: alongside the sunny stuff, there's the sinister pulse of Macchina or Lithium, a sparse, nagging synth pattern fractured by bursts of white noise and what sounds like feedback. As well as producers, both Plessow and Worgull are great DJs, blessed with ability to smoothly shift between moods. You can hear it in Cocos, which starts with a pretty desolate piano figure, but gradually changes its disposition to something strangely uplifting over the course of six minutes, or Majestaet, which takes a curious emotional path from haunted to triumphant and back again.
To pick holes, you might suggest that, while Vermont is a radical departure for Plessow and Worgull, it isn't a radical departure in itself: it takes an array of past musical styles and rearranges them creatively, rather than venturing into the unknown in the way that the Krautrock they love did. But that seems like hairsplitting in the face of an album that's idiosyncratic, varied, beautifully nuanced and compelling in a field filled with music that fades vaguely into the background. Without wishing to deprive the world of high-quality house, it's hard not to hope that Vermont isn't a one-off, and hard not to wonder where Plessow and Worgull's partnership might take them next.
by Alexis Petridis via Music: Electronic music | theguardian.com
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