Olaf Rupp - Earth And More

The Free Jazz Collective 0

By Martin Schray

Nostalgia is a powerful feeling. Who doesn’t want to return to their youth or doesn’t like to think about what they have achieved back in the days. Also in music, there are bands that still exist but haven’t produced anything new for years. However, they keep on touring satisfying the audience’s desire to bring back days long gone. On the one hand, that’s absolutely okay, but on the other hand such concepts represent artistic stagnation. Of course, this idea of music hardly works in improv and especially the German guitarist Olaf Rupp certainly can’t be accused of suffering from nostalgia. "I don’t like to look back. Mostly I prefer to dream about the future," he says in the liner notes of his new album.

Nevertheless, he has now released an almost two-hour long album with music from the turn of the century. But in order to understand Earth and More one has to go back in history. At the time when the music published here was created, Rupp’s band STOL (with Stephan Mathieu on drums and Rudi Mahall on bass clarinet) had just disbanded and he began to focus more on freely improvised music. However, in order to see in which direction he wanted to go, he recorded and produced complete albums every month, sometimes pieces with the acoustic guitar, the electric guitar or electronics. Some were released, the rest became demo cdRs that were distributed all over the world. Some made it to Liam Stefani in Glasgow. The head of the Scatter label has kept them to this day. He was the one who initiated the idea to publish some of them and Rupp actually thought about his earlier music, listened to old tapes and “found a way to overcome [his] nostalgia phobia”.

On Earth And More we listen to a musician who is strongly fixated on electronics and for whom the guitar tends to take a back seat. Pieces like “Lorraine Rain“ or the title track remind me of Aphex Twin (without the drum’n’bass background), Throbbing Gristle, Test Department or This Heat! “I did not have a computer at that time, so I recorded directly onto cassette tapes and audio cdRs“, Rupp explains. “The setup was a heavily abused Behringer mixer which I modified so that I could cascade and feedback several channels. Then I had a few guitar effects: a looper, a distortion pedal and a bass guitar synth-pedal.“ Another influence on this music is techno. Whether the tracks are more ambient-like (“Makyō“) or seem to be based on computer game sounds (“Mai Outtake“), Rupp seemed to enjoy the purity of rhythm and sound.

Another surprise is the fact that he sings on two of the tracks. On “Goodlook“, with his constantly looping chorus line, which becomes increasingly alienated as the song progresses, he sounds a bit like Robert Wyatt. On “Lonely Woman” he is reminiscent of an experimental Nick Drake, who seems to have John Martyn as a second guitarist and who extends his melancholy songs to infinity with ambient sounds.

Finally, the last two tracks - all in all 35 minutes long - are pure ambient music. “Upstate 1 and 2” were created as music for an exhibition by photo artist Gabriele Worgitzki. The music is functional and very spatial, with loops that work like a beat. Both tracks are wonderful, especially “Part 1” with its echoes of music of the spheres and the sparse guitar arpeggios even gives the piece a psychedelic touch. Bands like Autechre and Boards of Canada come to mind.

The result of this journey into his artistic self was Rupp’s turn to improvised music. Life Science, his first album on FMP, was released in the summer of 1999. Nevertheless, it would have been exciting to see in which direction the electronic musician Rupp would have developed.

Although it is unusual music for our blog, for me it’s one of this year’s most interesting releases so far.

Earth And More is available as a download. You can listen to it here:

EARTH AND MORE by Olaf Rupp