Back when I was still at school and trying to get my weirdy music tape label off the ground without the help of funding, interest, or even Letraset, I was briefly in correspondence with Guido Hübner of Das Synthetische Mischgewebe. His letter opens, rather endearingly, with you must excuse me in advance that I doesn't can write you so many like you, doubtless referring to my tendency to address seven or eight handwritten pages of complete bollocks to justifiably bewildered strangers. This implies that I wrote to him first, although I have no recollection of this. I gather, from what he wrote, that I'd proposed an exchange of art - something visual for his magazine or possibly something musical for one of my tapes. It never happened, which almost certainly means I sent him one of my collages and he decided it was shite, which was probably fair.
Anyway, if nothing else, this meant the name stayed with me, and over the years I noticed that he seemed to be doing better with his thing than I'd done with mine, and yet only now have I finally heard his work. Even given that I had no expectation of what it would sound like, it's come as a surprise and one hell of a puzzle.
This is a double ten inch disc of - I don't know what, perhaps the sound of an installation, music in its own right, or something else entirely. Sonically, it seems to be related to that laptop glitch stuff which may or may not still be doing the rounds, although it's less predictable, less easily quantified than most of what I've heard in that genre. Blips, clicks, squeals, and other fragments of sound emerge from mostly silent grooves in such a fashion as to suggest the arbitrary pops and surface noise of the vinyl should be considered as integral. Some of the sound appears treated, although the occasionally metallic quality may simply be part of the initial digitisation process, where other sounds may be more or less natural, notably instances of what sound like a condensing microphone rubbed across fabric; and there's very little repetition, or indeed anything which might lend familiarity to whatever the hell it is that we're hearing. In other words, Neunundvierzig Entgleisungen is probably about as obtuse as you can get without turning into the New Blockaders, and that's its charm - at least for me - namely that it obliges the listener to put in work.
After listening to this thing for more than a week, it has come to remind me of the music of Pierre Schaeffer in the absence of almost any other comparison, although the sounds are so abstracted from their respective sources as to suggest where Schaeffer was heading more than what he did, and it isn't musique concrète. Nor does it seem to be anti-art in the sense of the aforementioned New Blockaders, but rather attempts to [pauses to push spectacles further up bridge of nose] forge a new sonic language from the ground up. It seems to have things in common with certain abstract expressionist artists - although probably not Pollock - or even with Yves Tanguy or Joan Miró. Rooting around online I learn that Hübner applies a certain visual sensibility to his work, so that's what I'm going with; and if I'm way off target, it's nevertheless been a pleasurable aural and psychological workout.
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