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"Pick up the phone and answer me at last. Today I will step out of your past"
The Notwist are Markus Acher, Micha Acher, Martin Messerschmid, and Martin Gretschmann, and they are from Weilheim, a town of 20,000 inhabitants, 45 kilometers from Munich.
From the same Weilheim also come the Tied and Tickled Trio, Village of Savoonga, Potawatomi, and Lali Puna.
Too many bands for such a small town? The explanation is simple; they are all side projects or bands in which the Notwist themselves or their closest collaborators are involved.
The Notwist's journey began at the end of the '80s when they were playing metal and evolved through the cover of "Johnny and Mary" by Robert Palmer in 1993 to their current form. The Notwist produce songs through the successive addition of parts and fragments carefully sought out, among samples and real guitars, managing to synthesize a totally original form.
"Pick up The Phone": a clarinet, then a rustle or screech of a volume knob with oxidized contacts, sampled becoming the rhythmic base, then a delicate percussion from an analog drum machine. The guitar enters; a single note on a single string, slow and inexorable, then Markus Acher's melancholic and disenchanted, resigned and hypnotic voice. Then a distorted bass. And the beauty is that all these elements are introduced one at a time. Then I hear the clarinet submerged in the mix again, with each listen discovering another of the countless instruments they use in the background.
They do not hide the rustles brought by the microphones, a technical error in theory, but it serves to give depth and atmosphere, treated like a sample. The attention to detail is manic; the overall effect is minimalist.
Other things must be discovered and sought out. "Out With The Freaks" is pure pop as I understand it, and for once they also turn up the volume; "have you ever been all messed up?"
An intimate, delicate album, turned in on itself, that spins on itself, talking about rooms from which one will never leave.
And yesterday I spent the whole day trying to understand what "today I will step out of your past" means. Maybe nothing, but I made the line my own. "You're the color, you're the movement and the spin..." from "Consequence," too.
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