Bohren & der Club of Gore
Geisterfaust

Starting as a doom-metal quartet, from which they borrow the sonic stasis and an indigestible heaviness, the three German multi-instrumentalists comprising Bohren and Der Club Of Gore shift, from their second album “Gore Motel,” towards a unique and entirely instrumental sound, assembling dark ambient atmospheres with obsessive noir-jazz reverberations.

Having crafted masterpieces like “Midnight Radio” and “Sunset Mission,” the group undergoes a transitional phase with “Black Earth,” perfecting a formula even more elephantine and stagnant compared to their previous works.

This formula will later be refined and consecrated in the sixty minutes of the cataleptic “Geisterfaust,” where, in addition to the classic lineup of keyboards, drums, bass, and saxophone, vibraphone and tuba are added to create a sound, if possible, even more monolithic.

What probably makes this music unique is the conception of the temporal dimension and the resulting atmosphere of suspension.

The times are always expanded, spreading like dark stains of thick oil: the flickering of the ghost drum does not serve, as it traditionally should, as the backbone of the sound but rather accompanies the other instruments mumbling, tinkling in the background; perhaps suggesting that time is a relative concept... and that everything depends on how it is experienced. The purpose of this music is to expand it as much as possible.

The bass is prominent, a soft vertebra of an almost invertebrate sound. Along with the keyboards, it spins idly on itself, lazily, the embodied antithesis of the concept of progression, in a cycle wherein the snake eats its own tail, in the nest where every noon is nevertheless always midnight.

The keyboard gently lulls us with minimal variations, brushstrokes of essential ideograms, and so does the vibraphone.

The atmosphere is nocturnal, corrupted by opium and absinthe, and rare are the rays of light that manage to pierce the foggy curtain that constitutes the sonic matter, something palpably narcotic and unreal.

It is an eternal night that the daylight cannot dissolve, a thousand doubts that waking cannot in any way dissipate.

In the over twenty minutes of Zeigefinger, a hypnotic loop in which rarefied synthesizer petals swirl endlessly around us.

The vortex spirals in a merry-go-round: it wants to suck us in, urging us to take the ascetic jump upwards toward metaphysical realms.

Should we risk and let go?

Doing so entails a jump into the void, an exploration into the unknown's meanders.

These notes unfolding like water lilies in deafening silence are there to remind us: with their funeral pace, they vibrate in the nighttime's stillness void, as the teeth of claustrophobia grip around the heart with yet another loop of barbed wire.

Hope is a languid and persuasive bass, wrapped in a plush and muted atmosphere, muttering and staggering, bogged down in the oil of paranoia: the fear of falling, of being swallowed by the knotted bowels of the abyss beneath us is ever-present, and the air becomes dense and unbreathable.

In these eternally fog-enshrouded swamps, the atmosphere is vespertine: it vibrates with warning, at the bottom of which the arteries of dreams pulse in relief.

Time is agonizing, elasticized: it prolongs itself, spinning with relentless slowness.

A neurotic and barely perceptible rolling of jazzy drums punctuates the nighttime hours; and, hunched under a lamppost on rain-washed sidewalks, the ghost of old Bob, set to music by Angelo Badalamenti, peers out.

His silhouette, in the mist, pulses with red light, swelling and deflating to the yawns of the bass.

In Daumen, the notes dart through the darkness like shooting stars; then they fade, leaving an echo trailing in the depths of frozen space.

Chilled by what lies below and entranced by what lies above, we proceed cautiously, one uncertain and faltering step after another, our feet scraping along the edge of the wire, trembling and swaying to the breath of a hallucinated vibraphone.

Looking down into the abyss's darkness, we are blind, terrified by the dark ghosts of our conscience, creeping treacherously under the black shroud of a profoundly dark ambient.

But the darkness is not only below us: it is also within.

Indeed, it seizes the stomach in Ringfinger; it is the primeval blindness leading to all others. It stagnates and presses to break through the pulsating and thin membrane of the limit and finds a way out.

Will it be the spring that will make us take the leap?

But we realize that even looking up, we are blind: indeed, the polychromatic light of a gothic cathedral dazzles us, pouring raging and sinuous into our pupils.

It embodies Apollonian harmony, with monosyllabic choirs, a meeting point between the dark rituals of Gregorian chants and the purgatory exhalations of steel from “Heartache” by Jesu.

And so we proceed: our feet bogged down in the subconscious's ancestral fears, our heads feverish with dreams... we sway from side to side like clock hands, the battery melted; like underwater plants with roots in the abyss and the head turned to the glow of rarefied stars... to the glimmer of what does not yet have a name.