On my way to start a bar in Tennessee, I was shown a PSA from 1986 called Club Life. It put the fear in me; the bar never opened. If I had heard “Land Ab Neu” by Springintgut & F.S. Blumm instead of watching Club Life’s leading looker, Hollywood Cal, burn his energy through perilous trials, then I might have formed a cleaner, even spotless, vision of club life: crisp as a polished apple and polished as a tumbled stone.
“Land Ab Neu’s” cello and guitar strings are dressed to the nines: best suited to be savored while seated at stain-free barstools along a spit-shine bar rail under soothing and slow-blinking green and orange lights. The strings, though modified and processed, have a raw and healthful appearance, even as they glitch, trill, and stagger over chiseled beats. Digital effects cultivate the movement of the melody and instill, in the sinuses, nostalgia.
It is the kind of nostalgia that delivers the past to the present, turning it into a temporary home. The body unwinds as it warms up in front of the fireplace in a stranger’s cabin. The stranger is out for the evening, and there is enough time to become familiar, comfortable. At any given moment, we may be asked to leave.
• Springintgut: http://www.andiotto.com
• F.S. Blumm: http://fsblumm.free.fr
• Pingipung: http://www.pingipung.de
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