Carsten Jost - Perishable Tactics

Pitchfork 70

Carsten Jost is a co-founder of Hamburg’s Dial Records, a label responsible for minimalist classics from Lawrence, Efdemin, and Pantha du Prince, among others. Jost (aka David Lieske) released his debut album, You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows, way back in 2001, when Dial’s favored strain of moody, minimalist house was still relatively novel; the deep house revival wouldn’t happen for another decade. Since then, he’s put out very little else, even as the style he helped establish has become ubiquitous in underground dance music, from the Smallville label’s twinkly-eyed tone poems to the muted chords and buffed textures of the so-called “lo-fi house” phenomenon.

Since 2007—with three new Carsten Jost tracks that year, it was an uncharacteristically prolific period—his output has slowed to a trickle: one song on Dial’s 2010 compilation; a split single with Lawrence in 2011; another compilation cut in 2015. Lieske put out a full-length with his duo Misanthrope CA last year, but that album’s dissonant, doom-laden ambient is a long way from his ruminative and rhythmic sweet spot. Finally, however, the wind seems to have blown him back into the studio. The resulting album goes to the heart of the Dial aesthetic: wistful, hypnotic, and torn between ecstatic abandon, cool remove, and encroaching dread.

The bookending “Intro” and “Outro” are stylistic outliers. Closer in spirit to Misanthrope CA, they combine ethereal orchestral samples with drifting synthesizers and distant scrapes and drones, suggesting Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project if Voigt had been brought up on a steady diet of Ligeti and doom metal. The album’s nine remaining tracks proceed almost like a set of variations upon a theme. His grooves invariably emphasize the thud and hiss of classic Roland machines, and his crisp claps and flashing hi-hats cut through the swirling murk like searchlights. He likes his chords plaintive and his reverb trails long.

A few cuts are more melodic; the bittersweet “Atlantis II” features a bassline vaguely reminiscent of Ricardo Villalobos’ “Dexter,” and its layered string pads are unabashedly sentimental. “Love,” originally released on a split 12” in 2007, carves out a clean-lined counterpoint between Rhodes keys and a rich, tonal conga pattern. Mostly, though, he applies his layers of synthesizers like watercolors, and the blurred edges of his melodies seep outward like the outline of a stain.

Like much dance music, Perishable Tactics seldom gestures beyond its immediate environs; it’s a music of immersion, of immediacy, and also of deep isolation. Whereas most dance music is social, Lieske spins his fibers into a soft, hermetic cocoon. But the occasional crack in the façade affords a glimpse of ideas not often found in conjunction with house music, beginning with the militaristic theme that runs through titles such as “Army Green” and “Dawn Patrol,” as well as the ominous cover photo of a shirtless figure crouching beneath a Mylar space blanket, clutching some kind of heavy weaponry. The theme becomes explicit on “Platoon RLX,” in which a brief snippet of dialogue echoes in an incessant loop over mournful strings and a restless drum groove. “How’d you get the nickname?” asks a voice; “The killer?” whispers another in reply.

The clip comes from The World of Charlie Company, a 1970 documentary that the CBS News reporter John Laurence made while embedded with an American rifle company in Vietnam. It’s worth bearing in mind that the Bob Dylan lyric that’s quoted in the title of his debut album has a deeper historical significance: That line, from “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” inspired the name of the Weather Underground, colloquially known as the Weathermen, the ’60s radicals who took up arms against the U.S. government. With these echoes of the civil unrest and military disasters of last century, Lieske adds even more sinister overtones to his already unsettling atmospheres. As it happens, the Weathermen have recently been back in the news: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s shadowy right-hand man, cryptically shouted out the leftist revolutionaries in a 2010 speech. If Carsten Jost is a kind of dance-music Cassandra, complicating club music with some serious end-of-the-world vibes, Lieske couldn’t have picked a more appropriate time to bring him back.