Zones in your bones. That’s the truth of the Polytechnic Youth.
That’s the truth of Perrache as well, the project of Stuttgart artist Joachim Henn. If Une Cassette Comme Les Autres, released earlier this year on Taping Desk O-phon Mania, was any indication, then we were probably in for a treat with whatever was coming next. Turns out Henn was just warming up for this one.
Barriere in Movimento (Barriers in Motion) promises a smorgasbord of krautrock and synthesizer drones, planet-sized soundscapes, and an aural experience probably best experienced in IMAX (if you’re even somewhere on this planet, and also if you’re not, you could pump this into outer space somehow and get away with it). However, the shifting bedrock holding everything up throws everything into uncertainty. What starts out a pulsing quasar (also suitable, strangely enough, for cycling in a proto–“Tour de France” kind of way) whites out by the end of “Synthismus,” a 17-minute launch into the unknown.
Then it hovers.
“A Gondolier’s Last Chewing Gum Blues” could easily be the ghost of a Godspeed tune based on that title alone, and it’s not unlike some of that band’s more ambient passages with its haunting synth tones blowing like wind above the alpine landscape. It bleeds into “Grace Althletic,” where Henn’s Harmonia worship emerges somewhere in the middle of the static and bass. From there, it’s a color-by-Roedelius/Moebius/Rother delight before it fades into the night sky, a glimmering visitor from another world winking out as it passes beyond sight.
And thus Barriere in Movimento is gone before you realize it. The trance it casts dissipates, leaving only the runout groove for the record needle to traverse before lifting and returning past an expanse of milky white vinyl to its resting position. You can blink the cobwebs from your mind, or you can sink deeper and do the whole thing over again. I know what I’d choose to do. Plus, I have hours to kill.
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