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Laube
Combining two previous tape releases, with a special edition including a third remix CD, the enigmatic German project defy any sort of classification or clear genre identification. The trio of Christian Dräger, Eric Bauer and Nils Lehnhäuser pull bits of ambient, jazz and drone together without ever fully locking into one style.  The pieces here drastically range from conventional structures to unadulterated, foundation shaking pure bass tones.
Most of the pieces that make up this compilation flow almost painfully slow.At times, the three piece (drums, keyboards and bass, as best as I can tell) work together in some sort of clinical deconstruction of the jazz trio ensemble.Rather than the smooth tones and soft rhythms usually associated with the genre, here they are isolated and amplified into pure dissonance."I" from the first disc lets the bass notes reverberate seemingly for eternity, resulting in a violent, vibrating swell of noise.
The band avoids the drums on pieces such as "III," allowing for the individual notes be expanded and sustained as heavily as possible.Disc two's "Dove Gray" has some percussion, but so infrequent that it is hardly able to considered a rhythm, but an accent within an ambient/post-industrial type expanse.The bass is isolated simply into walls of sound on "Pewter Gray Metallic," heavy on the low end but organizationally extremely sparse.
When the three players lock into a more conventional structure, such as the jazzy "I" and "II" from disc 1, or the slowly shuffling "Classic Cream," they create a sound best described as a lounge version of Sunn O))) or Earth’s 2000-era releases.This may seem like a cheesy gimmick, but it is anything but.Rather than corny, it has a disquieting, disturbing feel.The instrumentation is familiar, but played with such a deliberate slowness, it just sounds "wrong" in the best possible way.
A limited run of the double disc set includes a third disc of remixes by OKR.The Spartan elements of Laube's original work are extracted and used to construct extremely different works out of them.The first piece takes the tones and minimal sounds that featured heavily on the first disc and bathes them in layers of reverb, with OKR filling in the mix and giving a light ambient drift sensibility.The second piece piles the layers on more into a dramatic film score type piece, while the third picks up the pace and builds a melodic sequence and synth pads out of the stark tones.
Laube’s sound is one that is extremely familiar and recognizable, but performed and recorded in such a way to be anything but comfortable.It is not exactly dark music, but disquieting and just enough out of place to be unsettling.It is that uniqueness and dissimilarity to anything else that makes it a gripping and occasionally perplexing album.
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