There were 27 years between the first two Engelhardt/Seef/Davis records, and just two between the second and this third. As such accelerated productivity might suggest, we find the artist - one Kai Althoff if you need be reminded - in typically primo form. Althoff is, by anyone's estimations, a renaissance man, an interdisciplinarian widely celebrated in the art world and with a shape-shifting musical catalogue that traverses decades. What he's perhaps best at - or at least what I like the most - is a kind of wonked out avant-pop absurdism (see his contributions to Workshop and four albums recorded as Fanal), an approach that he's leaning into wtih extra accentuated fervour on abceefd, ten idiosyncratic synth-pop oddities that sit within some kind of mangled interzone that unites the private experiments of Tara Cross, the semi-dayglo hyperactivity of a demo-stage Animal Collective, those mid period Werkbund LPs, and a DIY Pop Ambient Cologne were it more parts DIY and Cologne than Pop and Ambient. Mostly, though, Althoff is on his own time here, and like with previous album Pry, the overall sense is of an artist happily adrift in their own universe with little regard for imagined audience. The results are as authentically singular and romantically rendered as any first gen minimal wave/DIY invention you care to mention, somehow both crude and sophsticated. A true art brut, if you like. More so, it's wild and inspiring that someone so deep into their career is out there doing exactly what they want, how they want, at whatever speed they wish. abceefd sounds like absolutely nothing else this year. There's little higher praise.
FFO: Tara Cross, Jeff & Jane Hudson, TRii, Werkbund, Animal Collective, Inga Copeland
Engelhardt/Seef/Davis - abceefd
£25.00
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