Burkhard Beins - Structural Drift

Burkhard Beins: e-bowed and propelled zither, analogue synthesizer, e.t., looper, igniters, chimes, wood block, steel band, fire and stones

Burkhard Beins is best known as one of the most distinctive percussionists in European free music, performing in groups both in Berlin (Phosphor, Perlonex, Activity Center) and beyond (The Sealed Knot, Trio Sowari), though on the strength of his two solo albums, 2007's Disco Prova and now Structural Drift, he's no slouch as a composer either, bringing the same acute ear for timbre and immaculate sense of timing to more fixed structures. But whereas Disco Prova, with it's rattling machinery and Joy Divison samples, was an affectionate nod to the industrial and new wave music Beins grew up listening to, this new releases's shifting tectonic plates of synthesizers, E-bowed zither and self-designed electronic instruments (including ET, a hendheld oscillator with built-in speakers) belong in a parallel universe of electronic music along with the psychoacoustic wonders of Eliane Radigue and Maryanne Amacher.
Beins's compositions retain the same fondness for occasional sudden shifts of texture and dynamic that characterizes his improvising. Combining purely electronic sounds sourced from a Korg MS20 with his customary organic performing materials, wood and stone, the three pieces on the album were conceived and elaborated during a residency earlier this year in the Lower Saxony village of Worpswede, and the landscape surrounding the village, as shown on the album cover, with it's lonely roads, bare trees and leaden skies, seems appropriate. What on first contact might appear cold and featureless reveals on close listening a remarkable wealth of warmth, colour and detail.
- Dan Warburton, The Wire -

2009 STRUCTURAL DRIFT (rapidshare/mediafire)