The day machines learned how to love, the satellites careened one last time round the earth till they’d spent all their power, petered out and burned up in the atmosphere. Things had come full circle. At the dawn of the 18th century they’d entered the evolutionary arena as a brand new species. At first, although they soon evinced creaturely emotions and musical intuition, the humanoids exploited them as tractable slaves. The machines – and this is the latest zoologically accurate designation for this life form – have only undergone their long overdue emancipation in our day.
Under their nom de guerre “Alphawezen”, Ernst Wawra and his singing comrades-in-arms Asu, Verena, Simone and Fred have already twice demonstrated their expertise in the weird and wonderful world of electro-apparatus. Their first two sound carriers, “L'Après-Midi d'un Microphone” and “En Passant”, floated with somnambulistic lightness and poise over the fertile no-man’s land between the genres of trip-hop, house and electropop, hovering over the fine line between art and kitsch.
A typical Alphawezen recording session is less like a composer’s studio session than a conspirative get-together, replete with elated twitterings and chirpings, murmured and whispered exchanges of secrets and piquant remarks. The reward for this courteous treatment of the machines resonates through the very first track: “Green Eyes” is possessed of a complex and magical melancholy peculiar to creatures who, after centuries of slavery, have at long last been proffered a helping hand (namely, Mr. Wawra’s nimble-fingered one). The masterfully interwoven melodies, which have become hallmarks of Alphawezen’s music, evoke en passant delectable scenes in the mind’s eye of the attentive listener. In this case it’s the iridescent self-abnegating “tears in rain” that android replicant Roy Batty talks about so movingly in the movie Blade Runner. But the forceful string theme at the close of the piece intimates that some day the machines might no longer take their exploitation “lying down”, as it were. We can only hope compassionate voices like Asu’s here will then assuage their rage: “Hush, hush, let's get lost,” she sings, or rather whispers, to us on the second track, “Gun Song”. And indeed, the strings that come in again at the end of the song are no longer marching toward their just cause, but exude a sighing soulful well-being like that of the Beast bewitched by its beloved Beauty. Before you yield yourself up in wonder to the astounding maturity of Wawra’s menagerie of machines in the serene climes of the redemptive grand finale hymn “Doux Rêves”, there’s a lot to discover – and sometimes even to smile at. In “Film3” or “Freeze”, for instance, Wawra elicits from a very affable specimen of an old Korg synthesizer the very sweetest of sound-pearls from the depths of his creaturely trance.
On this third album Alphawezen takes us through the vast realm between experimentation and calculated effects, bringing us full circle to the first album. Since the days of the legendary band Kraftwerk, many have shown that machines can produce more than just rhythmically repetitive booming and thumping. But it wasn’t till Alphawezen’s musical experiments that we learned that polyphonically intertwined enunciations of their vitality have the melodic quality and complexity of 19th-century Italian arias. Naturally, the next question is what skills this lovable species needs to learn now to attain at long last the coveted status of fully-fledged living beings. The answer is: breathing.
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Gun Song (El Niño Weekend Version)Interview: Talk about Alphawezen
