2014 marks twenty years of KREIDLER. The band has outgrown adolescence, but remains juvenile, reckless, impetuous. They recorded their new album ABC in Tbilisi, Georgia. And there will also be a film –by Heinz Emigholz, who accompanied the last album DEN with film clips. ABC. Like TANK, it's two times three: Six tracks characterized by elliptical shifts, where suddenly the bass and drums take over the helm – or a choir appears.
Indeed, a choir. KREIDLER worked together with Georgian singers: Either hovering freely in the meditative pop piece Ceramic, or defining a new space within a space, as in Nino. Nino perhaps most clearly suggests that the album was recorded in Tbilisi, Europe's southeasternmost metropolis, on the former Silk Road at the intersection of East and West.
Nino opens the album –a piece made for setting off in a convertible with the top down, moving at the steady pace through the speed-limited traffic zones with the speakers pumping. A female voice takes over for Alphabet and the mood rises. It rocks as only KREIDLER can rock. Then a short pause with Destino, which displays a melancholy longing that leads to abstract No Wave Funk. Modul is similar to Nino, yet even more relentless. And Ceramic is reminiscent of Crepuscule, the Brussels dandy label, but less of a particular song or band, and more of the label itself, which was perhaps the most European of all record labels: Beauty as an argument. Tornado concludes ABC.
Tornado may be spelled out like Alphabet, but Kreidler aren't taking any prisoners here.
A scruffy smoothness unifies the tracks, which rely less on layers or the shifting of variable patterns, and more on riffs. Yes, riffs. But not hashed out on guitar or bass
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Alex Paulick is more the sequencer, the lead sound, or the cloud. It is the synthesizers of Andreas Reihse and Detlef Weinrich that provide the definitive propulsion. And wasn't it the case with the last album DEN that KREIDLER even considered making a record without drums? What a peculiar endeavor. Once again, Thomas Klein's distinctive playing was destined to press the songs further forward, onward, ahead.
As always with KREIDLER, ABC is about the exploration of freedoms within a previously determined framework. It is a formulation of convergences, of possibilities within a procedural movement, based on a notion of democracy, with socialism in mind, where one understands that restraint is not merely a strategy of a conceptually inclined band, but that it serves to strengthen the validity, precision and ma
jestic authority of expression.
PS: The cover uses photographic works by Thea Djordjadze. The Georgian artist usually works directly within a space, combining sculpture, painting and found objects into ensembles. Many of her photographic work are comparable, arranging diverse elements in a black (or white) box. Her works reflect art and cultural history, refer to Georgian folk art or even Soviet modernity. They often contrast “poor“ and „valuable“ materials or combine raw and designed elements.
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