Roudi Vagou & Läuten der Seele - Taghelle Nacht

In typically prolific fashion, Läuten der Seele's Christian Schoppik returns a mere handful of months after his last collaboration with a new split LP release with Matthias Kremsreiter's Roudi Vagou project. As you might have guessed from the listed personnel, Taghelle Nacht provides another vital extension of the Gespensterland of collagistic post-industrial dark ambient that's been slowly perlocating in the German underground over the past decade or so, the kind of haunted olde worlde song that really only seems to make sense within the context of itself - I've consistently found it tricky to contextualise Schoppik's music outside of his own work (be that as Läuten der Seele or Brannten Schnure), and that continues to be the case here, even if he does dovetail beautifully Kremsreiter's similar grasp on interstitial, purgatorial sound and composition. The samples, loops and layering that define their approach often feel more painterly than constructed by what we might conventionally label as a 'musician', the favouring of decayed textures, found melodies and ghostly aberrations creating the sense of lost time and hidden worlds. It's ostensibly palimpsestic in nature, in a way you might connect with The Caretaker or Hype Williams, but with its own specific intentions that seem to speak to a world that's gone, or, somewhat phantasmagorically, was never really there (that noon-at-two-o'clock sound). In the era of retromania and reanimation, these are the kind of approaches that seem to find new understandings and perspectives embedded in the old. It's the way they hold the page to the light, so that you can see the strange sediment of history run right through it. 
 
FFO: Brannten Schnure, Juho Toivonen, Hype Williams, Dean Hurley, Leyland Kirby