Strings + Feedback

California-transplant to Berlin Andrew Pekler's third full-length and first release on Staubgold. On his two previous albums (released on the Scape label) Pekler led his listeners on a random walk through the clear and mysterious air of a metropolis at midnight. There he met with a form of jazz one may be familiar with from French films of the 1950s. He picked up this music's narrative and re-told it to the listener by adding a lively tinge of digital contrasts. Those two albums may be taken as necessary starting points for him to arrive at Strings + Feedback. The ten tracks on this new album embark on an excursion into the direct vicinity of sounds and into the inner life of the mixing desk. It is here where sounds are organized, where they all must pass through, that Pekler develops his breathtaking signal flow. Inside his mixing console, Pekler forces a conversation between a few string and piano samples (taken mostly from Morton Feldman's work in the 1950s), forcing unpredictable encounters, intensification and distortion. If Pekler on his previous albums appeared as a minute observer who knows how to describe even the most delicate atmospheric conditions through music, then on Strings + Feedback he has become an intermediary between sound worlds. Similar to the imaginary circuit diagram on the album's cover, Pekler's pieces leave the safe and beaten tracks on which most specialists tread and instead create open-ended and yet-to-be-discovered paths which cannot be described through the logic of a manual. It may be unintentional that the cover design is reminiscent of the 1960s Situationist's visionary city maps, but it matches Pekler's approach as he creates a new topography by re-organizing existing sound material. In the words of Yoko Ono: "Draw a map to get lost."