MYSTERY SEA 26 | Aalfang Mit Pferdekopf | [Genmaicha : At The Opal Seashore]

ARTWORK

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INTRODUCTORY WORDS

-" Once you dreamt sitting at a coarse beach under a murky sky. Surrounded by a green, alga-filled ocean.
Its waves – ceaslessly.
Dying, reincarnating. There you watched two persons – merely silhouettes in the dusk or dawn.
One of them: cogitating, wandering around. The other filling a little hole in the sand with that salty water. A kite at the firmament: the body of a black ray – hovering. You smelled this curious fragrance of burnt rice. On your tongue: the sweetness of golden honey. And your general mood is: sorrow – because you dreamt of being a butterfly – and now you don’t know who you are...and there’s nobody here to push your head in a bucket full of cold water...nobody to laugh about your silly wasting and exertion. Dreams ? Are another salt of life but lead nowhere. Just going in infinite circles. Like time. Devouring themselves. Hunting your own tail again and again. Don’t become this dark cloud looking for a black cat in a dark house at midnight – don’t drown in philosophy. Start your search but don’t search ! Have a nice dive..."

- Mirko Uhlig, August 2005

PRESS RELEASE

Aalfang Mit Pferdekopf is the somewhat strange name of german eclectic Mirko Uhlig's surreal exploring solo project...
Mirko usually surrounds himself with a line-up of collaborators for his varied sound excursions...
In the wake of a strong experimental legacy in his own country, and based upon a sort book of "no rules",
these soundscapes mostly drift from loose improvisations
using an array of different instruments, sometimes even incongruous, & field recordings...
This could suggest an heterogeneous, shambolic ambience, but the resulting pieces are often surprisingly focused & intense...
So far, Aalfang Mit Pferdekopf has a discography of several self-released discs, as well as MP3s (notably, an EMERGE remix...) and a recent release on EINZELEINHEIT... but also scheduled are already a 7" for DRONE, and a 3" cd-r on the ever tasteful TAÂLEM...
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On "Genmaicha...", an halo of vapours float
above a sea green basin,
and opening up the thick silence,
a rain song rises, circling,
humming like a soundtrack to a nocturnal "Aguirre"...
a ghost in the moist air...
meshes of alluvium bringing you back to a place of deep calm...
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"Genmaicha..." ceaseless churns, filtering its own echoes,
exuding the murmurs of bamboo fountains,
drawing an exotic postcard from neverland
where shrouded in mist and oblivion,
we inhale celestial magnitude, a glimpse of a Whole...
-
"Genmaicha..." is like an audio-ceremonial to get rid of the superfluous...
a digest of essential fluid...

TRACKS

01. The Fragrance Of Rice Over Green Calm Waves > listen !
02. The Butterfly Dream > listen !

LENGTH

40'17

REVIEWS

VITAL WEEKLY 501|Frans De Waard
The oddly named Aalfang Mit Pferdekopf was mentioned before, in Vital Weekly 488, when they supplied all sounds used by Emerge on their Verato Project release. Now we know it's one Mirko Uhlig from Germany behind this name, and he plays himself some dark ambient music, at least on this release for Mystery Sea. Aalfang Mit Pferdekopf applies no strict rules to his music, he does whatever seems necessary, using 'different' instruments and field recordings. The two cuts on this release show this quite well. Dark and mysterious music of a highly obscured nature. Computer manipulations me thinks of field recordings, slowly moving and slowly unfolding, majestically wandering around. Deep, ambient and drone-like music. Nice as such, and no doubt something that fits well on the catalogue of Mystery Sea, but also without many surprises (as is the current trend in drone music, I believe). But nice indeed. Well made.
vital weekly

Touching Extremes |Massimo Ricci
"Genmaicha", besides being a very pleasant listening experience, is also my favourite album by Mirko Uhlig until now. The whole record is centred around amorphous sensations, its aesthetic engulfed by an equalizing process that privileges the cutoff of high frequencies, transforming Aalfang's soundpool in a morass of disturbing voicings, muddy chords and unquiet spirits dancing and whirling in slowly crumbling cathedrals. What's even better is Uhlig's work with sonic consecutio: no matter how we try to abandon defenses to get overwhelmed by reluctance, the breathtaking loops used by Mirko to raise the level of evocation work wonders in soliciting our sense of doubt, bringing out the most profound despondency in a continuous flow of appearances and displacements. Fantasies can be scary sometimes but this time Aalfang Mit Pferdekopf's imagination gave birth to a quasi-masterpiece of ultramundane music.
touching extremes

Mouvement Nouveau |Tobias Fischer
Someone once quipped that talking about music was like dancing about architecture. This is so obviously wrong that we seriously suspect that it wasn’t in fact Frank Zappa who said it, but rather some hopeless cynic. On the other hand: Aren’t the biggest cynics just the romantics who got disappointed most? “Genmaicha” seems to have been written especially for them. For this is an album that takes you all the way back. To a place and time, when nothing was important and nothing impossible. When worries were far away and there was only warmth, trust and tenderness. These two stretched-out pieces are the endless oceans of a nascent cosmos and an eternal womb – everything moves slower here, yet with the powerful and comforting heartbeat of mother gaia. When you’re inside a bubble, you can feel both safe and suffocating, both sensations are present here: After the frightening opening sequences of “The Fragrance of rice over green calm waves”, a long, longing sigh commences, which impalpably changes its colour and pulse – at times you will find your cradle being gently rocked by a tender hand and then again some evil claw is reaching out for you. Someone touches a fender rhodes by accident, but apart from that, there is no obvious melodies or themes, just harmony and a beating heart. “The Butterfly Dream”, then, sounds like the echo of a kiss inside a pitch-black tunnel, like bells striking in reverse against a cloth of felt. After fourty minutes, you’re leaving the Opal Seashore again – or is it leaving you?This is Aalfang mit Pferdekopf’s fourth fabulous full-length, after his self-released debut and the “12 Seepferdchen” record on einzeleinheit and it should give back at least a glimmer of hope to all those broken souls out there. For, even if our description should only come half-way in portraying how great this music truly is, it doesn’t prove Zappa right. Instead, talking about music is like talking about love – just because it’s not the real thing, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
mouvement nouveau