<\/p>\n
Free the beat \u2018Reveal and Rise\u2019 by Brutter (the sibling duo of Christian Wallumr\u00f8d and Fredrik Wallumr\u00f8d) presents us with a witty, playful and continually diverting sonic text that raises all sorts of questions about music and how we listen to it. As a kind of anti-techno, it also challenges what the theorist Theodor Adorno called, with reference to the commercial swing or dance music he took for jazz, \u201cthe undisputed predominance of the beat\u201d. The opening track, \u2018Easier Listening\u2019, sets the scene. An almost reggae-like groove – part electronic rimshot and kick-drum, part industrial piledriver and life-support bleep, perhaps – develops a rich organic life of its own over the 2 minutes and 46 seconds of its brief life-span. In one sense, nothing – or nearly nothing – happens. In another, there\u2019s a universe in its grain of sand. And so it goes on, each track revealing more and more information with each subsequent listen. For all its seeming randomness, music like this doesn\u2019t just happen. What might seem on the surface like chance events are actually compositional strategies (even when they are also, at least partly, chance events too). We have to credit the broad range of experience in the varied careers of Christian Wallumr\u00f8d (born 1971) and Fredrik Wallumr\u00f8d (born 1973) as both composers and instrumentalists (in other lives Christian is a pianist; Fredrik a drummer; both have long and impressive discographies). They take joint credit for all of the contents of \u2018Reveal and Rise\u2019, co-composing and playing drum machines, synths and electronics. It\u2019s also necessary to register the very important contributions made by Helge Sten, who mastered the album, and Johnny Skalleberg and Stig Gunnar Ringen who made the initial recordings, with Skalleberg also mixing all tracks. Together, they form the anti-techno production team.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When is a beat not a beat?<\/p>\n
By liberating the organisation and repetition of sounds from the dictatorship of any consistent musical measure, and by extending the range of permissible instruments or noises to include whatever they like, Brutter have created their own twisted brand of avant-garde electronica. Here, perhaps, all notes are equal. It\u2019s also a world where the distressed sound of Eighties drum-machine disco hand-claps shares the sound-stage with the air-pressure squirts and jack-hammer thumps of what might be ambient noise from a loading bay or light engineering workshop. What on the surface appears to be a rather cerebral deconstruction can also turn out to function subliminally as the kind of thing it\u2019s supposed to be deconstructing; becoming, as it were, a sort of slowed-down and de-natured form of industrial funk. The weirdly disjunctive, unconventional rhythms invite disjunctive movement too, and could be used very effectively as the soundtrack to a contemporary dance piece, or a filmic update to the famous machine-rhythms of \u2018Ballet Mecanique\u2019, co-directed by Fernand Leger with music by George Antheil.<\/p>\n
The opening track, \u2018Easier Listening\u2019, sets the scene. An almost reggae-like groove – part electronic rimshot and kick-drum, part industrial piledriver and life-support bleep, perhaps – develops a rich organic life of its own over the 2 minutes and 46 seconds of its brief life-span. In one sense, nothing – or nearly nothing – happens. In another, there\u2019s a universe in its grain of sand. And so it goes on, each track revealing more and more information with each subsequent listen. For all its seeming randomness, music like this doesn\u2019t just happen. What might seem on the surface like chance events are actually compositional strategies (even when they are also, at least partly, chance events too). We have to credit the broad range of experience in the varied careers of Christian Wallumr\u00f8d (born 1971) and Fredrik Wallumr\u00f8d (born 1973) as both composers and instrumentalists (in other lives Christian is a pianist; Fredrik a drummer; both have long and impressive discographies). They take joint credit for all of the contents of \u2018Reveal and Rise\u2019, co-composing and playing drum machines, synths and electronics. It\u2019s also necessary to register the very important contributions made by Helge Sten, who mastered the album, and Johnny Skalleberg and Stig Gunnar Ringen who made the initial recordings, with Skalleberg also mixing all tracks. Together, they form the anti-techno production team.<\/p>\n
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