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CD Feature/ Aalfang mit Pferdekopf: "Fragment 36"

  Tobias

Dreams can be frightening to some. To others, they are a source of inspiration. Mirko Uhlig, head of Aalfang mit Pferdekopf, has used plenty of the intense and surreal images of his minds’ nightly excursions as a starting point for compositions. On “Ich habe nur noch 12 Seepferdchen in meinem Tempel”, he travelled to a place called Ungariyin, where dead bodies float in the water, a lit match reveals mountains of ice and a penis spews flowers, before revelling in the “musings of a dead sparrow”. What easily could have ended up a mess, turned into fascinating exavations at the brink of the halucinating subconscious’ construction site. For “Fragment 36”, he has dug even deeper.

It has always been clear that not everyone could follow. While the general media response to this record has been mainly positive, a few reviewers found it hard to comment on two short pieces “with no focus”. It is definitely true that everything about “Fragment” defies commonplace expectations: It doesn’t scream, it doesn’t yell and it doesn’t holler. It has no tunes to whistle to and no obvious punch lines. Its cover is a water colour collage. And it even in the drone genre (which Uhlig, after a string of lush modern classics, has already left again in search of new horizons), this is an unusual release: “Part A”, inspired by a dream of red fields and a majestic mantis flight, builds steadily from a fibrillating layer of light to a short outburst of white noise, then cools off at the shores of a joyously dabbling river. “Part O” meanders through a more varied landscape, opening with a birds chirping and a short glockenspiel motive, which wakes the listener from the his daydreams, like a doorbell in an empty sanatorium. Then the mist rises from the banks, tiny bells chime deeply in the distance, unidentifiable sounds hover the air and the single, repeating note of a technoid bass jumps in and out of the picture. The return of the glockenspiel heralds the end and closes the cirlce. Heraclit leands the philosphical background, but the less one approaches this music on an intellectual level, the more enjoyment one is likely to draw from it. Dreams, after all, are simply the result of a brain in free assembly mode – trying to analyze them would be the same as analyzing the configuration of ojects inside your wastebin. Which doesn’t mean the result can not be enticing: Once you have freed yourself from expectations and allowed the music to lead you (instead of the other way round), “Fragment” will guide you to a place of bizarre beauty and tantilizing tangabilty: If you reach out your hand, you can almost touch it.

From the early beginnings to the current acme, with accolades on many of the biggest webzines, Aalfang mit Pferdekopf have followed their own path and this is a perfect summary for the uninitiated: Full of connotations, hazy passages, spaced-out sounds, driven on by a mysterious underlying current. Merely the radical breaks in a piece’s flow have given way to a seemlessly drifting whole. According to Uhlig’s latest comments, the Aalfang moniker will now take a short break and disappear from his busy schedule for a while. To some, this may come as a relief. To most, it will be missed.

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: Aalfang mit Pferdekopf
Homepage: Mirko Uhlig
Homepage: Drone Records