Evermore
Cathartic and beautiful. 13th century Zen monophony meets weird electronica.
One of the joys of exploring the vast Roedelius oeuvre is his ability to spring surprises, even in his late mature phase. The unexpected bonus of the 59th album of his discography Evermore is duets with Hiroshi Nagashima, a shinto priest from Tokyo. His lucid mastery of the shakuhachi - a vertically held bamboo flute - immerses you in Sui Zen (Blowing Zen) with his long shrill lines of rasping and honking tones that penetrate parts of your brain that you didn't know you had. Reodelius is on tip top form too as his liquid ambient electronca surges, contracts and ripples in response. If the use of flutes in electronic music often leans towards winsome cliche, the shakuhachi has an intoxicating strangeness to western ears. Elsewhere two tracks lifted from the Lieder anchor things with song-based compositions, while in the final track Rapoon (aka Robin Storey) remixes Nagashimi's riff into a bizarre duck-quack-meets-Techno anthem. East-meets-West doesn't come any better than this.
