Otto von Schirach
8000 B.C.

Nothing. Nothing in the world since it has existed. Nothing will ever reach the complexity and unparalleled inventiveness of what is now the undisputed king of electronic music in the forms of futurism, experimentation, and expressive freedom that suit it best: it is Otto Von Schirach, a true Genius, a man who, in a single track, or rather in a single fragment of a track, systematically manages to showcase more ideas than most of the most acclaimed artists - electronic and otherwise -, many of whom are authentic legends, masters of experimentation, and among the absolute favorites of the writer; artists I would never speak ill of, but when it's time to present the facts, well... let the facts speak.

Well, the facts say that Otto Von Schirach is an Experimenter with a capital E, Otto Von Schirach is a superior mind, Otto Von Schirach is an entity to be revered and adored for the rest of our days. Oh my, perhaps we're exaggerating, but how else could we frame this character, a character so incredibly, just so incredibly advanced, that he surpasses concepts such as infinity and periodicity, a brain that will require at least a couple of centuries before his crucial work is fully understood unanimously. An artist whose importance even outweighs that of a Beethoven, who, needless to say, pales in comparison to OVS's testament!

Heavy words and comparisons, we're at it again, but it's truly impossible to define, without resorting to hyperboles and superlatives, the immense genius of the man who can be considered the father of the most uncategorizeable shit ever to appear on the Earth's globe, the true disciple of Stockhausen and Nurse With Wound, both of whom are far surpassed in terms of experimentation. Otto von Schirach is the most experimental artist in the world throughout history, his albums have the most experimental, unimaginable, and complicated sounds ever to emerge in the history of music, sounds that would even reduce legends of the famolo strano electronic/digital/modern/super-complex format such as Autechre, Matmos, Monolake, or Richard Devine to mere amateurs.

A man who has, progressively, lost his mind, producing what are the most insane and delirious records ever to reach our ears, even ending up releasing on Mike Patton's prestigious Ipepac, another madman who greatly admires him, or mixing death metal with hardcore and Miami bass, initially becoming the Prophet of the horrid, even sampling his own poop, pee, and the vomit of a horde of fans to make incredible records, then ridiculing everything and everyone with collages aimed at resurrecting genres picked from the trashiest pages of music, or taking the piss out of more fashionable folks (his twisted parody of the more commercial dubstep, "End of the World," is famous, but we'll delve deeper into his legendary work at another time) and having barely enough time to produce a more 'serious' album - still removed from academic-intellectual indulgences - that is already a legend, probably the most important work in the history of music and all of humanity, an impossible work even to imagine, let alone conceive.

The Sound of 8000 B.C.

Hell yeah, Otto Von Schirach is too far ahead, the author of a record that is a masterpiece of stately proportions, but even more so a manifesto of the almost limitless power of electronic music, as well as the infinitely broader creative horizons - not always exploited - compared to any existing acoustic instrument derived from it. An album incredibly difficult to convey in writing: what you hear in "8000 B.C." indeed has nothing to do with what we are accustomed to in this space where we spend our brief existences, "8000 B.C." (Schematic, 2001) is more or less equivalent to a primitive man confronted with today's technology, between iPads, laptops, social networks, robots, and being asked to use them... an album that leaves you baffled by default, even if electronic, abstractionism, and experimentation are your main listening habits.

This is not about writing and reporting nonsense like 'frenetic guitars', 'the anguished and desperate singing of Y', 'the solo of X', 'chirurgical micro-rhythms' (here I quote myself), but a planetary orgy of new sounds, an album completely out of this earth - and even beyond what is presumed to be elsewhere - an album from a reality completely unknown to us, a SHOCKING work for its unspeakable and monstrous complexity, and a technique that makes Dream Theater look like lovely and clumsy novices, a technique and complexity for which any possible superlative, or the mere use of words like incredible, monumental, statuesque, crazy, etc., feels disgustingly limited. Tracks, arrangements, and structures where to compose a single second seems like Otto spent years and years.

Those who have read my other reviews will know that I rarely tend to exalt or abuse emphatic tones for records that might deserve it (see Autechre), on which I try to be objective and realistic; this is the exception, as we are talking about an exceptional work. 

But beyond complexity, there is the concept of ideas, absolutely overflowing from every perspective: do you know when a band plays the same things for many years? You know, like U2, REM, Iron Maiden. Or when a genre manages to be so compact and square that it can immediately be attributed to more artists and identified by a word that answers to the name of a musical genre? Do you know when someone experiments, even on a large scale, but can still be enclosed in a box, like industrial, glitch, musique concrète, rock... or at most 'abstract' if uncategorizable?

Well Otto surpasses all concepts of categorization and even those of abstraction and non-categorization, sounding not only different from anything already conceived but sounding even different from himself, album after album, experimentation after experimentation; every fraction of every piece of his, and especially of this album, is a new idea, never heard before, sounds never heard before, inventions never heard before, unidentifiable objects. Otto Von Schirach is a Radical. One who has ideas flowing from everywhere, even from the toilet (again we remember the brilliant EP with 'organic' sounds), so many that he can't control them, vomiting some of the most unique and uncategorizable and experimental records ever existing.

Try, try to categorize this album, try to do a cover of "Ecleptoze Chemiz-Tri" like you do with Aphex pieces, and you geek nerd pseudo-producers who copy Autechre's workbenches, open your Ableton, pumped with cutting-edge plugins, and try to recreate the sounds of "Aquantumzation Below Zero" with the same immediacy with which you redo the synths of Boards of Canada, try to play a specific passage of "Endothermic Cavewalker" with your guitar... there will be laughs!

It is also surprising that all fourteen tracks, without exception, are masterpieces, works of art of rare beauty; among the most glorious moments, we cannot fail to mention the hip hop of the 8000 years that is "25°46' X 80°12'" (where Otto immediately showcases his inhuman abilities in creating unusual sounds and intricate rhythmic patterns), "Time Traveling Lives" (Autechre spun out), "Tympanic Calcoolus" (intestinal gurgles in electronic version), "Lunatic Nitrates" (a computer with diarrhea), "C21 H39 N7 O12" (lightning scales of digital noise that not even Petrucci), the absolute abstraction of "Triangle Exit" and "No Wood" (what was that story of a tired and blunt Stockhausen towards the overused post-African rhythmic structures by the 'new' famous 'technocracy' pseudo-experimental? Well, he'd be proud of this!), the epic and majestic "Ecleptoze Chemiz-Tri" (how to rape your own arsenal), "Endothermic Cavewalker" and "Aquantumzation Below Zero" (hymns to dissonance), "Schematropolis Mirage", (probably the most sober and regular track, although not less surreal than the others), "Smelly Mustard" (a preview of the madness Otto will deliver in the following years, between crooked accordions, oriental arabesques, detuned jaw harps, gargles, and nods to Roger Roger's more carefree 'library music'), "Insectdezyde Juice" and "Elastic Paranormalites" (an electronics so advanced it's repulsive).

Hats off, folks, I practically mentioned them all... normal when we're talking about such an astonishing masterpiece, the most out-of-this-world thing you will ever hear. An album I personally love to define as the "Trout Mask Replica" of our times, which contains peaks of genius that Otto will hardly reach in such proportions in the future, even though much of his work is a 10/10, and this should communicate the grandiloquence of "8000 B.C", an album I would also recommend to those who want a clearer understanding of concepts such as genius, experimentation, and abstraction in modern laptop-driven electronics, with an obvious resizing of less suitable third names for such definitions and a big dose of self-irony that never hurts, a chimera in a world that often tends to take itself far too seriously (I mention just to make two examples, people circulating around the now hugely successful Deupree/Noto circuits, or the incorrigible wankers of the max/msp). Spectacular, absolutely spectacular.