Kammerflimmer Kollektief

"The birds sing their blank melody outside. They sing as if conscious of companionship, now alone as if to the pale blue sky; they sing passionate songs adressed to one ear only and then stop." - The Waves, Virgina Woolf
"Hier ist alles Himmel, aber anders als Herkunft. Oben sind Vögel, die mit dem Kopf nach unten an mehreren Sorten Windverlauf hängen, die man alle nicht untereinander tauschen kann. Die Sonne scheint; aber es ist gar nicht die Sonne: es ist der Mond. Wann eigentlich wurde es Nacht?" - Dietmar Dath
What they said on Jinx:
"Der Hörer gewinnt auf »Jinx«, dem neuen Album des Trios, den Eindruck einer Gesamtheit, die endgültig neu ist. Farbenfroh und organisch wirkt das Album der Karlsruher. Es hat jeglichen Ansatz von »Art«, im Sinne von »erkünstelt», verloren und ist, variantenreich instrumentiert, wieder mit zahlreichen Einflüssen spielend und durch das Mitwirken zahlreicher Gäste, wie etwa Martin Siewert, ein aus einer Stimmung heraus gespieltes Ganzes geworden. Wo Robert Wyatt nie Art-Rocker im landläufigen Sinne war und auch nie Jazz gemacht hat, und doch alle Elemente dieser Stile in seiner Musik als das Seine auffing, um seine wunderbare »Wyatt-Musik« zu schaffen, hat das Kammerflimmer Kollektief nun die seine, die »Kammerflimmer-Musik«, gefunden. Einige Momente auf »Jinx«, insbesondere die mit »mouth«, könnten direkt dem Wyatt-Album »Rock Bottom« entsprungen sein: Es ist kein Zufall, dass die Vocals von Heike Aumüller in den Credits der Platte, etwa in »Both Eyes Tight Shut«, so benannt wurden wie schon damals bei Wyatt. Wo früher Kürzel standen, kleine Ideen und oben erwähnte Rohheit, instrumentieren Thomas Weber, Johannes Frisch und Heike Aumüller heute zu Ende. Mit Cale’scher Violine, Saxophon, Pedal und Lap-Steel-Gitarren, getragen von Samples, Elektronik und Harmonium, kommentiert von einem in diesem musikalischen Genre an Gewandtheit und melodischer Prägnanz seinesgleichen suchenden akustischen Bass, wird das sechste Album des Kammerflimmer Kollektiefs zu einem weiteren Glanzstück im Katalog des avancierten Labels Staubgold und seines Betreibers Markus Detmer." - Christof Kurzmann, Spex
"While so many symbols seek to expel negative forces, Germany’s Kammerflimmer Kollektief opt for Jinx, the mythical bird who heralds bad luck, as the emblem for their sixth full length effort. The trio don’t merely offer the albums title to the evil creature as a sacrifice, but as though in an act of baptism, dip the whole album in its colors, rendering its skin serried, its will one set on rituals, challenges, and the reversibility of so many signs caught up in the play of jazz, folk, and ambient music. The inclusion of Heike Aumüller’s throaty voice makes this logic most apparent. Her devoted moans, trills and banshee-like wails act as a wash of blood bringing color to the crunching cacophony of squealing strings, scouring amp buzz and scratchy clicks and stutters. Her other appearance on the equally delightful ‘Both Eyes Tight Shut’ helps bring about another alchemical fusion, another amniotic soundworld, where ritual holds sway over all of the serendipitous highs and quirky noodlings. Aumülle appears to get lost in the transfixing repetition of her own beathy chanting, and as though seduced, the other musicians themselves creep into darkling electroacoustic storms. The other pieces display a more prominent earthy feel than that of their previous work, Absencen, which, though itself of a certain devilish charm, employed it within a cinematic realm. There is the psycho-active bursts of electronic interference, needling their way through expressive horn swells like so many rays of sunlight. On ‘Nest’ and the title track, the rhythms and choice of pitches grow increasingly brash, while the pings and coded chirps conjure a keen sense of trees and water, gravity and escape. Also of a this-worldly bent, the strange swayings, tongue slaps and suitably forceful pecussive effects that mark ‘Gammler, Zen & Hohe Berge’ reveal a technical playfulness, again suggesting that this world is ordered by ceremony and not the good-natured soul of yesteryear. A crafty, slightly cruel mindset therefore continually assesses the parameters of composition, sussing out their fissures, and performing many a potent spell in their ruins." - Max Schaefer, cyclicdefrost.com
"Jinx is one of Kammerflimmer Kollektief's finest and most intimate releases yet." François Couture, allmusic.com
"Das Album entzieht sich aller möglichen Kategorisierungen und zeigt eine 'Band', die zu einer vollkommen eigenen Stimme gefunden hat. Sie spielen es nocheinmal, das alte Lied von künstlerischer Neuerfindung. Absolut idiosynkratisches Meisterwerk!" - Ralf bei der Kellen, Jazzthetik
"Was hier passiert, ist immer noch enorm: Jazz ist (fast) weg, auch vom Gestus her, dafür immer mehr schabender Psych und pulsierender Prog-Improv der subtilen, präzisen und manisch-hypnotischen Art. Jinx erinnert fast an Naerby Shiras der seeligen Kalacakra - bestechend die Vocals von Heike Aumüller - , später werden elegische Folk-Schweifereien konstruiert und elektroakustische Kerouac-Exegesen vollzogen. Bei aller Liebe zum Früh-Werk dieser wie stets bemerkenswerten Ausnahmeband ist dieses Album doch ihr bislang faszinierendstes geworden." -Honker, Terz
"Jinx finds the group again maximizing their strengths, writing songs full of strange shadows and shrieks. Sound rises up from nowhere and disappears, the melodies are unfinished and in minor keys. It's a strange fusion of smoky, Lynchian jazz, odd ambient music and eerie, disembodied voices. There's ringing bells, creaking floorboards, sobbing violins. It's like an eternal funeral - long sustained fits of sadness and hopelessness that has no bottom. In the tellingly-named "Both Eyes Tight Shut" a female voice repeats a single mantra over and over, as if trying to console herself or keep the creeping dread from consuming her whole. It's a good place to start if you want to get a handle on the Kammerflimmer aesthetic - it's a field recording from a haunted house, a Civil War wake that goes on and on and on." - J. Edward Keyes, 17dots
"Epic soundscapes dotted with detailed intricacy." - Tom Ridge, The Wire
"The Kammerflimmer Kollektief makes the future shimmer with sweetness and passion." - Philip Cheah, BigO
"Immerzu wird der Hörer in den Bann gezogen von einem drone-Sog, der die Musik astral abgehoben schimmern lässt." - Alfred Pranzl, skug
"Still grounded in peculiar and chimerical rhythms, the disc combines Kollektief's traditional synthetic beats with unexampled organic and rhapsodic harmonies, often in the form of unintelligible, seemingly tribal female vocals ("Jinx" and "Both Eyes Tight Shut" are prime examples). The blending of these rather cross-culture techniques spin the sound into an entirely different direction, hypnotizing the listener into melodious pictorial hallucinations of rainforest walkways sprouting up down the main boulevard. As the jungle bursts through the sidewalk tearing towards the sky, cars and houses are overturned in slow, intentional patterns, as the listener strolls in omnipotent fashion through newfound nature. Whereas a lot of electronica/ambient music tends to assist in creating an atmosphere within established identity, the depth displayed throughout Jinx actually helps transport the listener somewhere else entirely. It's an out of body experience squeezed onto a single compact disc. (...) Jinx is a goldmine for fans of underworld electronica in search of something with a little more life, a little more bite. Scattered with some of the most goose bump inducing passages heard this year, the album still retains its ambient identity and seems to know exactly when to scream and when only to whisper." - Jonathan Brooks, The Silent Ballet
"Kammerrflimmer Kollektief get around to just doing what I wish a lot of other bands would do: executing the experimentation of these bands into well-crafted songs that are as much about the song as they are the sound. On Jinx the band has also mastered the ability to draw a whole spate of influences into a coherent sound. So while that loping, ungainly freedom of freak-folk is definitely a part of this music, it’s way more refined and palatable than that." Mark Abraham, Cokemachineglow
"Another dose of brilliance from Germany's uncrowned kings: I hardly know any band with more deeply meditative and moody qualities than Kammerflimmer Kollektief. Jinx is definitely the Kollektief´s strongest effort yet. Their mix of jazz, improvisation, Popol Vuh/Cluster/Amon Düül II influenced Krautrock and electronica has worked well since their debut album Mäander and they have developed from album to album. But Jinx beats everything they´ve done before." - Stephan Bauer, Foxy Digitalis
"...erinnert an nordamerikanische Indianergesänge oder Yoko Ono." - Andreas Brüning, Intro
What they said on previous records:
"In full exploratory mode, as they forge ahead inquisitively, leaving an ever-shifting, endlessly fascinating array of discarded sounds in their wake." - Matthew Murphy, Pitchforkmedia
"Kammerflimmer Kollektief's sound is enormous and mysterious, perfect for the dark or the veiled and shady corners of every city." - Lucas Schleicher, Brainwashed
"Das Kammerflimmer Kollektief schließt alte verlorene Räume des Free Jazz auf, erinnert an die dort immer schon vorhandenen melodischen Qualitäten, und das alles mit einem gekonnten Wechselspiel aus kurzen atmosphärischen Interludien und minutiös ausgearbeiteten Großkompositionen. Einer der horizonterweiterndsten jazzhaltigen deutschen Musikproduktionen der letzten Jahre." - Michael Engelbrecht, Klanghorizonte, Deutschlandfunk
"The minutiae of the arrangements is compelling and Absencen makes the difficult sound easy, crafting fragile and evocative textures from the interplay of six different musicians!" - Sam Davis, The Wire
"Similarly, the German band Kammerflimmer Kollektief has been colliding genres, except it does so in short and precise compositions. It's quite graceful in its contradictions, somewhere between the warm hues of a Daniel Lanois soundscape and the gnatlike movements of European free jazz." - Ben Ratliff, New York Times
"Die unmäßige Energie, die in dieser Musik steckt, bricht nicht aus, bleibt immer Ahnung und Andeutung. Die fehlende Explosion, diese unterschwellig bleibende Ekstase, ist zu milder Schwermut geronnen. Dennoch ist die Musik unmittelbar versöhnlich und zugänglich, niemals bitter oder bösartig. Selten war eine Musik, die sich ohne größeres Sträuben in einen Kontext von Pop, Lounge oder Ambient stellen ließe, so unverschämt reich, so überschäumend, so widerspenstig im Detail und gleichermaßen auch so dunkel, so sentimental, so gefühlig, so unmäßig sehnsüchtig." - Frank Eckert, Spex
"Absencen is mind expansion of the first order." - Ken Micallef, Orlando Weekly
"Very emotional, almost sexual." - Francois Monti, www.musiquemachine.com
"Absencen's stew bubbles and boils in a fiery, rambunctious manner; disparate compositional approaches enable the ensemble to display their versatility and interpretive skill in a variety of instrumental permutations. As it is, Absencen is a reminder of music's sustained, creative breadth." - Max Schaefer, neumu
The Story so far...
It all began in a bright storage room of the Upper-Rhenish poet’s museum in Karlsruhe in the mid-nineties: With old-skool equipment and an overdose of FMP & Wu-Tang, the first sketches of what would later be released under the nom-de-guerre "Kammerflimmer Kollektief" were conceived; the result appeared in 1999 under the titled Mäander on the Weilheim-based payola-label. A simulation of jazz with pop appeal (melodies!). "Instrumental drones & central European freakouts on violins and reeds. A kind of European down home NoWave" was what Matt ffytche in The Wire called it.
At first, a live realisation seemed unthinkable. As it happened, the people necessary for such an undertaking gravitated towards the Kollektief in a very short time and without having been summoned. They were Johannes Frisch on the double bass; Dietrich Foth on a variety of saxophones; Heike Wendelin on the violin; Michael Ströder on drums and Anne Vortisch at the synthesizer. The tracks of the first album were the point of departure for our joint excursion; the result was a concert tour and a huge and wild chaos, which in turn was documented at the Uphon Studio in Weilheim and released as a CD (Incommunicado, 2000, again on payola). It included "Venti Latir", a version of a song by Robert Wyatt, one of our great heroes and: one of the greatest soul singers ever. "Music is a chance for self development. It‘s another life, in which it‘s easier to develop the art of giving" - which is how John Stevens put it in the liner notes for Karyobin, the epoch-making first LP of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble from 1968. Felix Klopotek in German music magazine Spex, said it thus: "Listening to this music, it seems that free jazz as being played by, say, Pharaoh Sanders and Cecil McBee in 1969 has been put into a context where it meets and mingles with pop and electronics with consistency and effortlessness."
The third album, Hysteria, was released in Japan and the USA in 2001 and subsequently on Quecksilber in 2004. It was a hybrid of its two predecessors; a synthesis of solo work in the studio and a collective flush. Martin Büsser wrote about it in testcard: "As of now, I am not aware of any better interaction of jazz and electronic music as this brief but most sophisticated album of the Kammerflimmer Kollektief. In this crossover between the great Free Jazz-tradition (Alan Silva, early Charlie Haden), Kraut- and free form-rock (Third Ear Band, Neu!) and the blurring of sounds of This Heat, it is not only the points of reference which are correct, but something that is much more important and even rarer: their new and inspiring combination."
In 2002, changes were taking place within Kollektief: Michael Ströder & Anne Vortisch left; the remaining core was augmented by Heike Aumüller - who hitherto had been in charge of the artwork - on harmonium (as well as playing an active role in soundprocessing and songwriting) and Christopher Brunner on drums & vibraphone.
Cicadidae, the fourth album, was released in 2003 on the committed Staubgold label – as have all other releases since. The borders between analogue and digital, acoustic and electronic elements became more and more blurred. Somebody called it "Karlsruhe Psychedelic". Ulrich Kriest in Intro magazine had this to say: "After presenting us with sketches, the Kammerflimmer Kollektief now grants us the view of the whole picture. It is a collage. It is very probable that we will not get to hear a more profound album this year. The music of the future realised today. And from Karlsruhe. Who would have thought of it?" And Dietmar Dath composed the most beautiful liner notes: "Here everything is heaven, but different from the origin. Up above are birds that hang on different kinds of jet streams with their heads down, not to be interchanged. The sun is shining, but it's not really the sun: it's the moon. When did night fall, anyway?"
What followed were numerous gigs at festivals and in clubs across of Europe (all of which were splendidly organised by our agency Planet Rock and all of which we survived unscathed). The music learned to function in a multitude of rooms as well as under blue skies.
2005 saw the release of Abscencen, the fifth album. Here, sampling was reduced to a mere haze; almost everything had been played live and subsequently merged, processed and arranged at the computer. For this album, the sextet was augmented by the wind players Helmut Dinkel & Pirmin Ullrich and Martin Siewert, steel guitarist extraordinaire, noted for his work with amongst others Trapist & The Year Of. "Absencen is a tapestry woven from many and diverse translucent threads. The side that we behold is shimmering in a holy manifoldness, while from beholding it we can anticipate and construct the averted side. After all, we are not only endowed with the ability to hear, but also to think." (Markus Hablizel) In Spex, Frank Eckert diagnosed: "The excessive energy inherent in this music never erupts but always remains inkling and insinuation. This absence of an explosion, this ecstasy which remains subliminal has congealed into a mild melancholia. Yet this music is so placatory and accessible in an immediate way, never is it bitter or malicious. Rarely has music been so obscenely rich, so exuberant, so recalcitrant in its details and at the same time so dark, so full of sentimentality, so full of feeling and so excessively longingly."
From 2004 on, we performed live not only with the sextet, but also in diverse smaller line-ups. The most enduring of those proved to be the trio consisting of Heike Aumüller, Johannes Frisch and me. With our eyes shut tight, it provided us with a lot of room for excursions and turned out to be a fertile ground for new developments and experiences. The music became more and more organic, the interplay more intuitive. Jinx, the sixth and current album has been recorded largely in the Electric Avenue Studio in Hamburg by Tobias Levin (remember to listen to Reformhölle by Cpt.Kirk&!). It is a result of the many concerts which have been performed in the trio format. It is based upon improvisations on bass (Johannes Frisch), harmonium (Heike Aumüller) and guitar (Thomas Weber), which were modified and augmented with obverdubs at the computer. Moreover, singing can be heard: Heike’s voice fishes truncated words from the sound – in best scat-tradition. Shaman Doo-Wop! Guests were Martin Siewert (again) from Vienna on a variety of string instruments and Harald Kimmig at the violin. Also, Dietmar Dath provided another set of brilliant liner notes. (Remember to read Dirac!) As usual, the allusions are numerous, among them a reference to legendary hannoverian psychedelic group 39 Clocks and, well, the Jinx. As Lou Reed sang in his epic song "Street Hassle": "Some people got no choice/ And they can never find a voice/ That they could even call their own/ So the first thing that they see/ That allows them the right to be/ Why, they follow it/ You know what it's called?/ Bad luck." The fire ain't out yet, baby!
Discography (selected):
Jinx (LP/CD) Staubgold 2007
Absencen (LP/CD) Staubgold 2005
Cicadidae (LP/CD) Staubgold 2003
Hysteria (LP/CD) Quecksilber 2001
Incommunicado (CD) payola 2000
Mäander (LP/CD) payola 1999
Booking Contact: www.planetrock-booking.de
Taking Care Of Business: www.staubgold.com