Apparat
Duplex

The German Berliner Sascha Ring, (also known as Apparat) with Duplex, signs what in my humble opinion should be considered one of the 2003 masterpieces in the field of electronic music.
A perfect balance between melody and experimentation, between extreme abstraction and simplicity dominates this fascinating project, always teetering between suggested melodies, rhythm and noise digressions, glitch inserts, soft sounds and "spring-like" openings, all controlled with excellent technical mastery and an overall vision that prevents the individual tracks from lapsing into experimentalism for its own sake.

"Granular Bastard" opens the dance, a somewhat curious and daring choice since, being the weakest and least complete track of the entire project, it risks misleading the hasty listener about the actual potential of the CD.
The second track, "Contradiction," the only sung one (besides "Wooden"), winks at the traditional song form, and only in the rhythms does it foreshadow the deconstructions to come.

The fun begins from "Steinholz" onwards. Apparat puts aside his singing ambitions and focuses on the purity of sound.
A distorted drum machine over an organ background, in a rhythmic crescendo with reverse and granular delay interferences, frames the ethereal sax inserts barely sketched.
Masterfully dosed panning games introduce the Hammond's entrance at the beginning of "Interrupt"; "Wooden" begins on a bed of violins more Sigur Ròs than one could imagine, the usual reverb disturbances guide us to the attack of the rhythmic part, real whiplashes of sampled and squeezed percussion in every possible way (does the title perhaps refer to their "woody" sound?); in "Warm Signal" piano droplets keep us on edge before they merge into a melody supported by a single neurotic saturated bass note; the excellent "Schallstrom" plays it all on the evocative harp riff, here the rhythm proceeds more regularly, still surrounded by the usual sumptuous disturbances and various effects; "Repeat Till Overload" lives up to its title: we listen to a simple bass riff on which soft and twilight sounds are embedded, repeated in reverse to infinity, until the sound's complete rarefaction, the overload of the title indeed; we return to the recovery of a more "defined" melody with the beautiful "Cerro Largo," where a skinny guitar makes a timid appearance: impressive is Apparat's ability to build rhythms and backgrounds coherent with the guitar riff's melody, declined and deconstructed into a myriad of variants, supported by the usual rhythmic lashes in perfect delay countertime, hinted and overflowing basses, with the omnipresent organ weaving the melody; the brief interlude of "Interrupt II" (barely 50 seconds) introduces us to "Steady Uprising", another masterpiece of the CD: a "symphonic" opening in "crescendo", vaguely in Aphex Twin style, then a sudden turn towards a rhythmic delirium that finally reprises the initial theme; another fifty seconds shamelessly Mum ("Interrupt III") and the hinted sax overlap on the tangle of sampled voices in Negra Modelo, the final track where the sax from "Interrupt III" reappear, supported by an unusually flat and regular rhythm.

I highly recommend this work to all lovers of well-crafted and sophisticated electronica, otherwise I wouldn't know how to define it. Apparat is capable of tinkering with sounds and effects with the skill of a champion, and, very importantly for sound purity enthusiasts, he manages to treat the details rendering them in the form of exquisite clarity.
Listening is recommended in a state of religious attention locked in the darkness of your little room, or even better, if ever possible, on the peaks of some Himalayan summit or among the endless dunes of some boundless desert.