Hans Joachim Roedelius & Tim Story - Inlandish (Gronland)
2/5
By: Charlie Potter
This album is for people in a coma. 'Wake up' the synth seems to breathe, 'come back from the spirit world, your family are waiting for you'...
Inlandish bored me to tears on first listen, and even though I'm quite the metal fan, 50 minutes is still pushing it. But you begin after a while to realise that this album nearly completely hinges on the fantastic piano melodies, which are simple and evocative, if all a bit 1970's children's Christmas animation.
Now, a plea - it's about time that the people that write press releases, and reviews for that matter, should be banned from using the words B**an E*o. He's inanely referenced so much that sometimes you feel like you're swimming in circles trying to get away from the man. It seems incredible to me that one of the most important music makers of our time someone has made so much rubbish music - there are some gems here and there, but his ideas far out reach his realisation of his ideas. This is no bad thing, it's just that no one seems to keep up with his futuristic brain. Certainly not this bunch.
Anyway, one half of this Inlandish project is the "genius" behind the band Clutter, Hans-Joachim Roedelius (no, I had never heard of Clutter either), but the real driving force behind the affair seems to be Tim Story, who apparently hunted the former down, Hans-Joachim being his hero. It's astounding to find out that Roedelius is 73, and is providing the meat of the album on piano.
Tim Story's input, apart from getting the project together, is apparently all the electronic blips and clicks, along with the inevitable background soft synth, but really he seems to do fairly little on this album and what he does is relatively predictable and at times, and also weirdly dated. There are of course plenty of people making music like this, there are plenty of acts on the Static Caravan label who are probably doing better - one album it particularly reminds me of is Charles Atlas album called Felt Cover, which was released a good six years ago, and yet sounds less dated. But the piano playing on Inlandish is really quite superb, and if you were to buy it, it should be for this.
If you could somehow make this music into a sausage, you would want to do that and put it in a blender with a chipolata of sunn 0))) for about 3 seconds, and then return it to it's sonic form, just to add a bit of scuzz, a bit of depth to the sound, and just generally to jig it about a bit. Overall it's too long and boring - if you were in the mood it would undoubtedly do the trick, but even then probably only for the first half hour.
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