5/10 Groupshow. If for some reason you 'felt lucky' while googling this term, chances are great that you will be rather disappointed not to find some ideally shaped blond inviting you to come over and see her latest exploits with her friends. The Groupshow on your screen today is the joined effort of three German artists (Jan Jelinek, Hanno Leichtmann, and Andrew Pekler) who collaborated in crafting a release where their signature sounds meet. One must keep the stereotype of the efficient German in mind and assume that more effort went into selecting samples out of 200Gb of jam session data than choosing a name for this collaboration.
The sample palette of the album is one of the most exuberant I have heard in quite some time in the experimental and minimal electronic aesthetic. The digital cuts sound like they has been drenched in the same acid bath where DJ Food lay when crafting Kaleidoscope; the album's comparable off the wall quality and the difficult digestibility of this colorful sonic candy is striking at times. Rhythm is provided by the samples and their repetitiveness, as there is no snare or kick to be found in their respective recognizable form.
Most of the release's drive stems from the sometimes oscillating or stuttered, sometimes dreamy loops cascading over the always blunted variations of the twelve tracks that emerged from the artists improvised liaison. And although the exposition of the tight and copious audible scheme offers some tight constructions, the cohesion as an album suffers from the profound expertise of each individual artist. Each has his own background that influences the music, some have a more instrumental or electronic approach, but a failure to compromise sounds into a focused effort does the work in.
Making up the audible melting pot are the ambient jazz grooves of Leichtmann and Pekler submerged in a flattened out minimal chillout vibe sans kick courtesy of Jelinek. As such, it's a decent chillout album one might think, but it's there where the lack of cohesion and the LSD-colored plethora of influences make this a hard trip to ride out.
written for and published by The Silent Ballet
Groupshow website
Groupshow myspace
Scape Records
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