Christian Naujoks - Wave

Pitchfork 75

A maker of pensive, idiosyncratic music that blurs the boundaries between indie, electronic, and classical, the German musician Christian Naujoks would be an outlier in most contexts, and he certainly is on Hamburg's Dial label, which is nevertheless his longtime home. Founded in 2000, Dial is primarily a hub for the kind of moody minimal techno and crisp deep house espoused by co-founders Lawrence, Carsten Jost, and Turner, along with a roster that includes Pantha du Prince, Efdemin, and Roman Flügel. You'd be hard-pressed to find anything resembling a dance beat in Naujoks' catalog, however. His untitled 2009 debut, recorded on piano, marimba, strings, and flute, betrays the influence of composers like Steve Reich and Wim Mertens, while his 2012 album True Life / In Flames, for piano and marimba alone and recorded in Hamburg's storied Laeiszhalle, comes even closer to modern chamber music, right down to a reworking of John Cage's "Experiences No. 2."

What Naujoks shares with his label mates is a propensity for melancholy—his debut album features an acoustic version of New Order's "Leave Me Alone," retitled as "Off the Rose," that drives home the impression of Naujoks as a moody romantic with his hands stuffed in a tattered wool coat, staring out at the rainclouds over the harbor—and his third album, Wave, is the most exquisitely melancholy thing he's done yet. It's also the most expertly crafted, demonstrating a significant step up as both a songwriter and an instrumentalist. Shifting and narrowing his focus, this time he concentrates on the electric guitar, which is accompanied on a few tracks by his typically spare, searching piano arrangements. This time, there are no vocals at all—a not unwise move, given that Naujok's slightly quavering voice has never been his strong suit.

He avoids distortion for the most part, save some occasional, subtle overdrive, and though he occasionally multi-tracks his guitar parts, you wouldn't necessarily know it without listening closely. There's little in the way of artifice or obfuscation, just ringing delay and reverb that suggest an expanse as wide as the horizon. This is music that presents itself as the sound of things as they really are: metal strings, ivory keys, tape hiss, tube amps. The occasional squeaking of fingers against guitar strings, or the muted clunk of a piano pedal being lifted and lowered, lends to the music's grounded sense of physicality.

Both rhythmically and tonally, these are fairly simple songs, gently tugged between consonance and dissonance, and lullingly repetitive. The moments that stand out against this placid backdrop are often nothing more than small, brief riffs—a trill that pulls against the root note like white foam peeling off the crest of a wave. Lyrical, meditative, and faintly bittersweet, Wave traffics in affect: It is good music for hiking in the high sierra, for late-night drives through rural Maine, for sunsets on the Pacific, for rainstorms anywhere. Favoring major thirds and fifths and major sevenths, it leaves plenty of open space for the listener to project her own emotions into, and it is never cluttered: In the patient "Playback Room," a sedate call and response between piano and guitar, the guitar is only touched some 20 times in the song's nearly four-minute run.

Wave frequently brings to mind the work of Factory Records' Durutti Column. Naujoks' wistful melodies and rounded, jewel-toned chords are often strikingly similar to those of Vini Reilly, that group's mastermind and eventual sole member, and so are his atmospheric choices of guitar tone and effects, like the rippling delay of "Little Dume" and the burled flanger of "96 Frames Per Second." But that's hardly a drawback. The Durutti Column catalog itself often feels a bit like a set of variations on a single theme; that someone new should pick up the torch is a welcome development. And Naujoks' homage breaks new ground on songs like "Playback Room" and the title track, in which ruminative piano and guitar figures are spun into gauzy abstraction. The album's only real limitation is that the majority of its songs are all in the same key; given the uniformity of its palette, the songs begin to blend together by the record's end. But if we consider them as a set of variations themselves, that's hardly a grave flaw. It's not surprising that Naujoks is also a visual artist, because ultimately Wave feels like a one-room exhibition: a small gallery full of line drawings or watercolors all in a given style, matted in white and framed in blond wood—tasteful to a fault but still genuinely, even surprisingly, moving.