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The day machines learned how to love,
the satellites careened one last time round the
earth till they’d spent all their power, petered out and
burned up in the atmosphere.
Things had come full circle.
At the dawn of the 18th century they’d entered the
evolutionary arena as a brand new species.
At first, although they soon evinced creaturely
emotions and musical intuition, the humanoids exploited
them as tractable slaves.
The machines – and this is the latest
zoologically accurate designation for this life
form – have only undergone their long overdue
emancipation in our day.Under their nom de guerre
“Alphawezen”, Ernst Wawra and his singing
comrades-in-arms Asu, Verena, Simone and Fred
have already twice demonstrated their expertise in the
weird and wonderful world of electro-apparatus.
Their first two sound carriers,
“L'Après-Midi d'un Microphone”
and “En Passant”, floated with somnambulistic
lightness and poise over the fertile no-man’s
land between the genres of trip-hop, house and
electropop, hovering over the fine line
between art and kitsch.
A typical Alphawezen recording session is
less like a composer’s studio session than
a conspirative get-together, replete with elated
twitterings and chirpings, murmured and whispered
exchanges of secrets and piquant remarks.
The reward for this courteous treatment of the
machines resonates through the very first track:
“Green Eyes” is possessed of a complex and
magical melancholy peculiar to creatures who,
after centuries of slavery, have at long last been
proffered a helping hand
(namely, Mr. Wawra’s nimble-fingered one).
The masterfully interwoven melodies, which have
become hallmarks of Alphawezen’s music,
evoke en passant delectable scenes in the mind’s eye
of the attentive listener. In this case it’s the iridescent
self-abnegating “tears in rain” that android replicant
Roy Batty talks about so movingly in the
movie Blade Runner.
But the forceful string theme at the close of the piece
intimates that some day the machines might no longer
take their exploitation “lying down”, as it were.
We can only hope compassionate voices like
Asu’s here will then assuage their rage:
“Hush, hush, let's get lost,” she sings, or rather whispers,
to us on the second track, “Gun Song”. And indeed,
the strings that come in again at the end of the song
are no longer marching toward their just cause,
but exude a sighing soulful well-being like that of the
Beast bewitched by its beloved Beauty. Before you yield
yourself up in wonder to the astounding maturity of
Wawra’s menagerie of machines in the serene climes
of the redemptive grand finale hymn “Doux Rêves”,
there’s a lot to discover – and sometimes even to smile at.
In “Film3” or “Freeze”, for instance, Wawra elicits
from a very affable specimen of an old Korg synthesizer
the very sweetest of sound-pearls from the depths of his
creaturely trance.On this third album Alphawezen
takes us through the vast realm between experimentation
and calculated effects, bringing us full circle to the first album.
Since the days of the legendary band Kraftwerk, many
have shown that machines can produce more than just
rhythmically repetitive booming and thumping.
But it wasn’t till Alphawezen’s musical experiments
that we learned that polyphonically intertwined enunciations
of their vitality have the melodic quality and complexity
of 19th-century Italian arias. Naturally, the next question
is what skills this lovable species needs to learn now to
attain at long last the coveted status of fully-fledged living beings.
The answer is: breathing.
1. Green Eyes 2. Gun Song 3. Fim3 (Brigitte Bardot) 4. Days 5. Freeze 6. Out Of Sight 7. Me Optimized 8. Road Movie1 9. Déjà-Vu (Vocal Version) 10. RootsTrackers 11. heimat.de 12. El Nino 13. A Thousand Tears 14. Doux Reves
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