As said last week, the package of Cosmic Winnetou that dropped on the doormat at HQ contained three cassettes, of which Modelbau and Celer were reviewed last week. The third cassette, "Ausflüge II", was from label owner Günter Schlienz and the reason why it was skipped last week was simply that it would be more fitting to combine its review with another release in the same series ", Ausflüge I" which came in this last week.
So, I first did to stroll around on the interwebz and see if there was information on Günter which could tell me a bit more about his background and previous releases. Because yes, never had I ever heard of him before. This is weird because it is the kind of ambient that might have come up somehow. I mean, modular, homemade electronics / synth-DIY, manipulated field recordings, guitar ambience, improvisation... But let's stick to what is known about the experimental music scene, and that is that it's all way larger than each of us individually thinks it is.
The first of the two cassettes is "Ausflüge I" on the Cosima Pitz label - which is not a label but a publisher with label activities. So there is a little 'meta-question that arises, seeing that a publisher publishes books with stories: Is "Ausflüge I" a publication in the form of a cassette with music, stories, or poems ... Or is it music released by a publisher that also happens to release cassettes nets to books and such. Well, it's a bit of both, actually, in my opinion. The four tracks are roughly between 10 and 20 minutes long, making this almost a C60. The titles are very descriptive in origin "Abendspaziergang", "Marsfrühstück", "Strandnachmittag", and "Nachtgewitter", and the music is ambient with a lot of improvisational characteristics. A dense drone layer and arpeggiated melody are almost the standard backdrops over which sounds are layered to tell the story. I can imagine why in previous reviews, the term New Age is also mentioned, but for me, personal New Age is more 'just a sound', while Günther very obviously invests in telling a story.
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