J. Peter Schwalm / Markus Reuter: Aufbruch

In 2020 electro-acoustic programmer/keyboardist J.Peter Schwalm paired up with Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen for the excellent outing Neuzeit (RareNoiseRecords), one of the year's standout discs. 2021 finds Schwalm collaborating with touch guitarist Markus Reuter, of Stickmen fame. The music this collaboration creates can be described as industrial sound-scaping mixed with noises welling up from deep Earth or emanating in from deep space, tectonic and galactic at the same time.

"Wall of sound" is a phrase used to describe the late producer Phil Spector's approach to recording (the 1963 single by Ronnie and the Ronettes, "Be My Baby," is an early example of this). Schwalm and Reuter make their own futuristic wall of sound, as dense as Jupiter's atmosphere, it sometimes seems; at other times as thin and vaporous as the "air" on Mars. Reuter is ofttimes making noise unlike anything you'll hear from a conventional guitar, and separating his contributions from keyboardist Schwalm is near impossible. A luminescent nebula spinning in space—in the fictional context of its existence within an atmosphere—might sound like this.

The project was initially conceived as a long distance, swapping files affair. This was shelved for an "in the flesh" recording, with Reuter sculpting angular blocks of sound, while Schwalm painted on thick layers of synth sound color, in cinematic landscape creations without borders, warped by surreal "Twilight Zone" backdrops.

A beautiful and fortuitous oddity surfaces in the set's seventh and eighth tracks ("Lebewohl" and "Losgelost") with Sophie Tassignon's ghostly vocals softening the overall concept, evoking spectral apparitions looming in out of the mists of dark forests. The album closes out with the placid "Abschied," that features an oceanic ebb and flow of sound—made by a twenty-first century, two-man electro-orchestra.