Diese, Nichts & Solche is Berlin sound artist and active Column One member Jürgen Eckloff’s first release since 2016’s Angeflantschte Fugenstücke, a record that made a deep, lasting impression on me when I first heard it. Unsurprisingly, this is true for this new tape on Fragment Factory as well; across both sides of the C46 a complex, cerebral slice of meticulous concrète-collage unfolds in a way not unlike a dream, its logic at once well-defined and utterly indefinable. Wriggling bits and pieces ripped from context, speech and slime and slurry, interdimensional phone calls and complete hogwash… all of these multitudinous elements somehow converse, even cooperate with each other, following rules well outside comprehension as they spasm and slither with an uneasy, skittering kinesis—much along the lines of the work of Eckloff’s labelmate and colleague Alice Kemp, or perhaps a more surgical Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck, especially with regard to the skin-crawling eroto-terrorscape that begins side B. (Though innocuous on their own, I can’t say I’m a fan of the inclusion of the Žižek samples, but I suppose it works with the rest of the sluice of perverse nonsense.) Diese, Nichts & Solche is indeed unsettling at some points, extremely intense at others, but through it all there are ever-present threads of pretty much everything else: humor, horror, rhythm, ruin, wonder, despair, one, none. Don’t listen alone, or at night… or at work.
Noise Not Music 