Black Pulse: Delta EP
Palazzo
Buenoventura: Gamma EP
Palazzo
Palazzo
How to keep a long-running group creatively vital? One way is for individual members to produce solo releases, the idea being that the move will prove rejuvenating when group activity resumes. And so it is that the three musicians of Elektro Guzzi recently issued separate EPs, digital-only releases designed to lead into the trio album Triangle scheduled for March 2022. It might be tempting to approach the releases presuming that each will orient itself around the instrument each plays in the group—Bernhard Hammer (aka Buenoventura), Jakob Schneidewind (aka Schneidewind), and Bernhard Breuer (aka Black Pulse) Elektro Guzzi's guitarist, bassist, and drummer, respectively. That, it turns out, would not only be too reductive but also wrong, as the releases often thwart that expectation. Instead, the EPs show the interests of each member expanding beyond instrument-associated zones into multiple areas. Naturally, echoes of Elektro Guzzi surface now and then, too.
Of the three, Hammer's Buenoventura set Gamma perhaps comes closest to recalling the trio's sound. The dynamic, club-ready opener “ICH” possesses all the propulsive thrust and syncopation that's the group's trademark. Warbly synth flourishes add to the trippy vibe, but it's the bass-throbbing pulse that's the primary selling-point. It's certainly easy to picture bodies crowding the floor when the swinging groove's so raw and funky. A spiraling pulse lends “DU” a dizzying quality that's again not unlike the kind one might hear in an Elektro Guzzi production. Similar to “ICH,” it's a techno-powered headrush whose charging locomotion would sound right at home in the club. Arresting the pace at EP's end, “SIE” opts for gloomy atmospherics and a slow, serpentine pulse to take things out.
Schneidewind's Beta relocates the listener into an entirely different realm, this one an ambient-industrial zone that has more in common with Frank Bretschneider and Carsten Nicolai. Thick industrial textures in “Oslo” suggest the grinding of an overdriven machine, though rhythm patterns gradually emerge to nudge the material in techno's direction. The bassist demonstrates an impressive command of sound design and arrangement in “Flux,” an aggressive beat pattern the foundation but the sound treatments swirling above it as ear-catching. “Braten” shifts the focus to electro-dub with a muscular pulse subjected to all manner of echo effects and the like. Still, while there's a definite club dimension to Beta, it more gravitates in the direction of sound experiments than Hammer's Gamma.
Breuer's Black Pulse EP Delta enters in pure tribal mode with the percussive-heavy “Alabama” and keeps on rolling thereafter. Hand drums, kit drums, and otherwise work together to induce hypnosis in the opener, after which “Haiti” and “Shimmer” turn their attention to twitchy, tripped-out techno of the kind one might hear at Berghain or on the Berlin club's Ostgut Ton label. That the three EPs are so different bodes well, one imagines, for the collective music the trio will be presenting soon on Triangle.December 2021