Läuten Der Seele

Christian Schoppik dove into the fairly large library of post-war Heimatfilme, German movies made to evoke a lost and possibly never present rural life, often shot in the Alps. (The Sound of Music is sort of a détournement of Heimatfilme, reinserting the Nazis that the genre was working so hard to forget.) In some places, Schoppik is just chopping up film samples and sending them through delay, and in other places, the sounds have been tricked out with additional instrumentation. The touchstones here are The Caretaker and William Basinski, in that sense of plumbing the past and then letting it loop, though these tracks don’t have such a permanent sense of melancholy. The tone here is more inquisitive and numbed out, a slow x-ray of an idea that no longer makes sense.

One half of Wurzbug duo Brannten Schnüre, Christian Schoppik also records solo as Läuten der Seele, and on this, his first album flying alone, he’s scaffolded his music conceptually – these twelve pieces are, apparently, built out of loops from ‘50s Heimatfilme (‘homeland’ films, responding to displacement, war and devastation by presenting idyllic domesticity and romantic landscapes). There’s something uncanny in Schoppik’s manipulations here – he’s grasped the nostalgic core of Heimatfilme and used it against itself, building discomfort out of the clashing of disparate elements from the genre. Cue glinting harps, folksy voices, swirling strings and spinning flutes, all mashed against each other, and spiralling into an anxious void.