Bohren & der Club of Gore
Piano Nights

THE REVIEW

It is not at all simple to talk about Piano Nights, the eighth nocturnal wonder by Bohren & Der Club Of Gore. The album is named after a solo piano performance by Christoph Clöser. A creeping silence runs through the entire work, a mood mirrored on sideral and icy slabs; a cigarette smoking for eternity on an unsupported ashtray. An empty, cold, and bare room, with no tyrannical presence around. From now on, we can finally suffer only from ourselves. Bohren's toxic apathy tends to fascinate only individuals adrift in a happy and conscious depression, first action to double-lock the door, through the keyhole no living soul is seen, yet through the dense and blinding smoke of the room, we discover we have been gifted new wings. Like in an apocalypse jazz farce with a Miles Davis as the last man on the planet, Bohren continues to germinate the monstrosity of that sound but with exemplary style. The solemnity of shadows, skillfully draping that dark sky over ambient, drone, jazz, and noir. Second action to arrange a meeting with an important person at the mall, to have a pure but invisible feeling, the courage to face an uncomfortable truth. Invisible among unfamiliar faces and faceless shadows in slow motion, grabbing the headphones from the pocket and immersing oneself in listening to Irwege, in the oblivion of that requiem sound, exiled from glances, waiting for words to find meaning, bouncing between the wall and the silence of a street that no longer offers shores. That person who will not appear and will disappear forever, among those broken notes, among that resonant bass line, among those tears so slow in descent. Piano Nights is a deep immersion gliding with wide open wings, a clever escape from perimeters, slipping between the legs of the potentates of thought, from the putrid and contemporary miasmas, a stolen lunar eclipse. An innate understanding of the language of flowers and mute words. Camped for decades on the tents of the Jazz Club, with memories of the luminous outside world fading with each album, Clöser's saxophone reborn after endless resurrections, forgetting the fleshy vibratos and the material touch on the roads of new dissolution, empty and synthetic, a tight embrace to a turnover of souls scattered on icy marble.

Third action, with Piano Nights codify new internal narratives, obscure even the imagination. Dissolve into the sound of that nocturnal vision, conduct the aesthetics onto an artificially mortal plane, with an almost imperceptible pulse and gently pumping it with a hint of still life. Crawling inexorably forward, in the direction of that desperate and wonderful sound, on the nocturnal tracks of Lost Highways, in the wake of that road illuminated only by the headlights of that car traveling incessantly.