Hans Tammen & Dark Circuits Bunker Orchestra: Ten Minutes Late With No Bus In Sight And No Taxi Either (Gold Bolus, 2017)

February 10, 2018 at 10:11 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Hans Tammen & Dark Circuits Bunker Orchestra: Ten Minutes Late With No Bus In Sight And No Taxi Either

Lengthy compositions played by a gigantic orchestra of synths (including Euroracks, a random tone generator, and a modified Moog Etherwave Theremin) as well as some very unhinged, impulsive drumming. Tammen is credited with “concept, composing, binary conducting”. There’s clear guidance to these recordings; it’s obvious that someone is telling the musicians when to be calm and when to explode and go crazy. When the drums get manic and the synths swell and saturate, it all provides an ultraviolet head rush. Probably the best track overall is “Kafka’s Hat”, a pretty thorough mix of heavy rhythms, musique concrete-like synth-work, and outer space overdrive. “Black Magic and Its Full Expose” is nearly 18 minutes, and interrupts interstellar voyagery with brief moments of far out, frenetic drumming which could’ve been recorded at some sort of carnival. The whole album is highly inventive and never predictable, and sounds like it was spontaneously created by humans in love with the possibilities of technology as well as intense, sprawling rhythms.

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