MODELBAU – FADING

Cassette, https://kringloopkassettes.bandcamp.com/

The title “Fading” is well depicted on the cover with a stamp used several times without refreshing the ink. It’s simple yet effective and – here it comes – utterly contradictory to the music here. I don’t know if you could consider me a fanboy because, well, I’m not. But About this release, there are a few things I should tell you. First of all, back in the day (old grey dude talking), you had cassettes of 120 minutes, 60 minutes per side and for this release, Frans chose those tapes. Yes, you are looking at two 60-minute ultra-minimal drones here, entitled “The Fading Time” and “The Fading Light”. They were created/recorded in March 2020 so it has the ‘old and minimal’ Modelbau sound. It was initially to be released on the Spanish imprint Important Drone Records but faded away because the label couldn’t get any c120 cassettes and ceased operations (not because of that).

The second thing I should tell you is that if you want to make a drone enjoyable, you should be on top of the movement within the composition. Simply putting a brick on the keys of a synth and modulating it a bit, well, that might be fun for you to do, but that’s not what makes a drone interesting. The more complexity is put within the actual sounds being used, how modulation affects the sounds and how different modulation and interpolation influence each other, that makes a drone interesting. Or the composition that makes the drone, I should say.

On these two tracks, Modelbau does exactly what a composer should do. He leaves out what creates unnecessary sonic movements, yet he enables the possibility for sonic movements to influence each other and the separate layers. Changes within the composition are there, but they’re so slow that, as a listener, you focus on the layers and find out about those slow movements after they are executed. So, if you are going through the composition digitally and you listen to slivers of what seems to be an eternity (60 minutes per piece, after all), you will hear those changes clearly and ask yourself why you hadn’t heard them before.

I think I’m gonna get the Bandcamp release, download the WAV files, and burn them to CDr so I can listen to them on different systems and places. This is some gorgeous material.