Freundliche Kreisel - s/t

It's been a memorable start to 2022 for Christian Schoppik, already responsible for one of the year's best with the Lauten der Seele LP released back in January. Here he reunites with his Brannten Schnurre partner, Katie Rich, and Baldruin's Johannes Schebler, another like-minded outer-zoner with whom he collaborated on the brilliant Diamantener Oberhof project (Vrystaete need to get that back in print). If you like all or anything about any of that music, then i've a feeling Freundliche Kreisel is going to be the one for you. Weird and eerie post-industrial folk digressions constructed from a palette of mostly pre-industrial instrumentation and palimpsestical/hauntological arrangements. Kinda like a melding of Dean Blunt and Sung Tongs-era Animal Collective process, yet very much tied to its own northern European context. The press release describes this as 'post-ironic romanticism', though i'd rather consider it pre-ironic, mostly because western culture has yet to move past distanced irony ('do everything, feel nothing' etc), while Schoppik, Rich and Schebler often appear to make music transmitted from a different (previous or future) era, untouched by the vagaries of the current world/late stage capitalism, wrapped and warped in pre-modern nursery rhymes and odd folklore. The feeling this music elicits is something akin to Knut Hamson's The Wayfarers on psychotropic drugs, a hallucinogenic sailing through concertina-ing epochs. Big stuff, big ideas, though most importantly, it also contains some of Schoppik and Rich's best songs, notably album centrepiece Voller Sorgen and closer, Spiegelbild. Haunting, cerebral and romantic, it's all the things this kind of music should be. Since irony wont save us from anything, be thankful Freundliche Kreisel do a grand job in uncovering new paths to enlightenment.