Klangwart: Sommer

In sweeping seven-minute sections of blown-speaker fuzz and rumbling drum machines, Staubgold label founder Markus Detmer and ambient artist Timo Reuber capture stifling summer Saturdays in the city. Sommer offers fittingly a bleary, electro-acoustic soundtrack of warmer climes, when the humidity has reached its punishing upper levels, and when the street’s grates simmer and smoke while paper-bagged beers grow lukewarm in damp dressings.

Analog synthesizers sputter over a gritty, rolling bass groove on “Moloch”, one of the lengthier experiments on this collection of unreleased and rare tracks from Klangwart. Indeed, for this all-instrumental set, Detmer and Reuber (and a couple of outside contributors) sifted through unheard pieces that came together during the German duo’s nearly two-decades’ worth of work. Those tracks are paired with newer ones, so that dark, apocalyptic textures blended in “Moloch” appear alongside haunting effort, “Wartehalle”, where layered field recordings are sequenced around drones, street sounds, and muffled coughs. It isn’t always an easy listen. The sinewy tones tracked for “Amobenruh” begin in a shrill place. A temperate medium ground is built after the album’s closer cycles for a few minutes, breaking the smothering warmth in the tradition of the first chilly morning in September, when it’s time to change the record and unpack the heavier bedding.