Landing soon!
First-time-on-vinyl, ten year (just about) anniversary edition of Baldruin's Miniaturen, a 40 minute collection of distinctively homemade, post-industrial quixotica transmitted straight from the hidden reverse of the Gespensterland. Baldruin is of course the alias of Johannes Schebler, a close ally of Läuten der Seele's Christian Schoppik, with whom he shared credentials in Diamantener Oberhofand and Freundliche Kriesel, and an equally prolific producer - there must be at least 20 different releases labeled with the Baldruin name since debuting in 2009. Like with Schoppik, Schebler carries a torch for a particular type of European arthouse music, the kind that runs back deep into NWW list territory, then up through post-/ethno-industrial and neo-folk and on into mutated, crepuscular electronics of the manner you might typically associate with Coil in this country but on the mainland has its own multi-variant strains - think Brunnen, Beequeen, Die Welttraumforscher, Étant Donnés et al. Like with much of the Baldruin output, there is a lineage being extended, as Schenler advances into Korm Plastics territory and weaves between 'dirty ambience' (TM - O Yuki Conjugate), synthpop oddities, grey scale glitched electronics and ominous drone in various time-dilating/reality warping ways. Interestingly, the original 11 tracks are now sewn together as one, shifting what was once diaristic and fragmentary into what now feels like an especially hallucogenic whole. Easy for this one to have been lost in long grass of the underground, but credit to Vrystaete for digging deep into the catalogue and reshaping what they've found through a new lens.
FFO: Brannten Schnure, Beequeen, Coil, Brunnen, Nina Harker
