KAMMERFLIMMER KOLLEKTIEF
Wildling
(Staubgold, released March 2)
At first sonic glimmer, Germany’s Kammerflimmer Kollektief wax too softly, too New Agedly to stir many passions apart from recollections of browsing self-help bookstores and listening a mite too closely to the soundtrack of a massage.
But this gently unfolding, boldly meditative recording by Thomas Weber, Heike Aumuller, and Johannes Frisch (Weber’s initial bedroom-recording project, which later morphed into a sixpiece collective, has found its latest, likely most efficient incarnation as a threesome) manages to harness a quiet power — consolidated with mere piano, double bass, synthesizer, guitar, electronics, and harmonium — in service of something far much more insinuating than most music that purports to rock. Numbers like “There’s a Crack in Everything” build with a cunning care that seems designed to explode into some sort of shattered noise free-fall, yet that never quite happens in Kammerflimmer Kollektief’s universe — and Wildling is all the better for its makers’ lack of artifice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tOW1FMnsYc