SEESSELBERG

SYNTHETIK 1 is the one and only album to surface from brothers Eckhart and Wolf SEESSELBERG but in its mere three quarters of an hour running time delivers a career's worth of frenetically shifting ambitious sonic ideas that resulted in what i deem a long last classic of the genre. While it may seem that these brothers were riding the wave of contemporaries like Conrad Schnitzler and Cluster, with whom they are for the most part compared, their interest in the sonic potentials of electronic discoveries dates all the way back to 1965 when Eckart was tinkering with his first electronic toys at the time when Wolf was occupied as a stage assistant at the local opera house. Inspired by the fertile nascent electronic sounds gestating from early avant-garde gurus such Raymond Scott, Edgard Varése and Karlheinz Stockhausen amongst many others, Eckhart spent the next several years exploring the emerging field of electronic music in a psychedelic context which all began with his initial interest with simple Walkie-Talkies that developed into fully freaked out symphonies of synthesizers embarking on the most tripped out journeys to planet Lysergia.

The album itself was recorded between 1971 and 1973 and begins as if an electronic simulation of firecrackers had been set off and then quickly goes through wild and raucous episodic outbursts, subdued drifting and various mood changing passages. Unlike many drone oriented contemporaries that milked certain electronic sounds to infinity, SEESSELBERG created a quite busy ever-changing procession of electronic sounds that include much more percussive and rhythmic segments that sound like some sort of proto-industrial grooves that would eventually emerge as the motorik style implemented by more popular German electronic acts such as Kraftwerk and Neu! While the music generates multi-faceted rhythmic clusters of percussion as one of the main features, these segments come and go and are augmented by atonal organ runs, atmospheric surrealism and other avant-garde psychedelic developments. This is free form electronica in full action taking advantage of every technique of the era and utilizing it on steroids.

This is some of the coolest experimental electronic music to blossom from this fertile era of creativity and one of the best finds which takes a completely different approach from the more popular contemporaries. SYNTHETIK 1 is point blank a truly bizarre electronic journey into the unknown where progressive electronic compositional delirium intersects with electroacoustic improvisation and irregularities of sonic waves shooting to the stars and beyond. Supposedly this album has some sort of theme behind the madness but suffice it to say that it works better as a collection of bizarre electronic manipulations that are set to schizoid mode that simmer down to chill and then are coaxed back into full freakery. This one is not to be missed by those who crave some of the most bizarre and texture-rich progressive electronica ever laid down to tape.

It's full of new fangled technology and effects that had just been unleashed for the first time, with the musicians appearing to be dumbfounded and confused as to what it all means. Almost as though they'd tried deciphering hieroglyphics upon seeing them for the first time.

This is a peculiar album for 1973, that didn't have a cats chance in hell of breaking into the top 100 anywhere on earth. There are, however, a few similar sounding artists such as Pierre Henry, Bernard Parmegiani and Conrad Schnitzler who also plunged headfirst into the deep end of early electronica. Sadly for 'Seeselberg' the previous artists do it better with more professionalism and gravitas.

It's all completely tuneless of course, with a copious amount of bleeps, bloops and splodges of early electronics, which visually would look like the remains of custard pies thrown at a wall.

None of it makes any sense and I guess there never was any. It's a wordless sound collage without message, meaning or frilly edges. In fact some of it is downright ugly, sounding uncannily like extreme Japanese noise masters 'Merzbow'. 'Kondensmusik' with its sped up VCS3 throb displays remarkable similarities to Aphex Twin's beat driven tunes of the mid-nineties. That's not to say that it's a success; it's not, in fact it's downright irritating. Seeselberg find a beat and frequency then repeat from start to finish without much variation.

'Synthetik 1' is not a particularly enjoyable listen and so much has come to pass since its inception in 1973 that it now sounds like a relic, an antique lost in time that is no longer relevant or necessary. A prototype experiment using a technology that would take a few more years to master in more capable hands.

If a Merzbow/Autechre collaboration from the '70s sounds like something that you'd like to hear, then seesselberg's synthetik 1 is the album to listen to. I know my review doesn't sound positive, but everything above is meant purely in a positive light.

The Seesselberg's brothers evolve a thing that appeared common and mostly fascinating around the times and the linguine hedonistic movement of electronic and complicated music: the search for brand new characteristics (mostly finding a lot of motivation in the area of sounds, of fractures, of noises and of atomized tensions of music), ways of flagrant expression, experiment and exploitation, plus an immense feature of unnatural and dissimilar patterns of music adaptation - listening to a lot of the artistic or obscure kraut rock which dispenses of all its "beautiful melody" and "courageous timbre" for a couple of insane and psychotic monumental orchestrations, or to the same quality of electronic music, grasping the experimental and the sharp resounds, proves the 'addiction' and the fully massive art-crash within those boundaries. Seesselberg's recipe was to create their own set of instrumental equipment (and they reach a set of electronics, synths, modulations and phasers beyond any calm and simple notion of musical-based technique, permitting them to move forward, into experiment and expression), plus based all their "Dusseldorf sub-school" train of thoughts towards a kind of unpredictable and very toughly and roughly balanced unique music amplitude, reaching the likes of Kluster and Schnitzler having revolutionized, based on impossible atonalities and dark spirits of sounds, the classic system of the eclectic genre. Some basic tangent characteristics with the psychedelic and kraut rock embers are made, but mostly this is a wild session of classic cold electronica.

The album synthetik 1 is composed of nine pieces, much to the sense of a dark concept and an independent stroke of composition. There's no rhythm and subtle line to follow in this album made of hollow, sharp-turbulent, astral-numb, technical apprised and hard trend-setting sounds, noises, music meter volatilizations and general impacts of synth-swirls. Everything is a dark and impressionable scratch, to the extent that excessiveness means the achievement of high drifts and impeccable motions. Nothing, except some vibrations and some colors, sheds light on how this burden can be interpreted leisurely or how melodies or simple electronic ideas can be depicted or can replace the ideal of mass experimentation. Since it also gains a stubborn quality of compelling more and more by each minute, it can appear heartless and drafty, cynical and made of an unstoppable imagination - true to a point, the Seesselberg experiment actually culminates at a point of electronic music not being randomly improvised, but produced, in a conservatory way, under coaled, deep, intrinsic and introverted fibers. A work impressive by its nature.

The sad part remains how this album had only 600 copies, how the Seesselberg brothers stopped only at this album and how, since neither apparently continued on other levels and into other bands their work and their etherized style. A cruel, but perhaps not absolutely astonishing fate. Another volume or two of synthetik wouldn't have presented in no way a loss or a deviance of this profoundly technical and somber-artistic vision.

Obviously very difficult and with a lot of unromantic, unnatural and unmelodious power to impress, this album is a very powerful experiment recommended to the very high artistic and architectural music one can love. A classic of its kind, though it simply proves a work of obscure and unwonted strength. Kluster, Schnitzler and other kraut-heads or electro-machinists did, theoretically, a similar kind of exploding art, some a couple of times more interesting, but that's not even close to relevant.