Frank Dommert Kiefermusik

Spencer Clarke (The Skaters) pulls up Frank Dommert and Christoph Heeman’s wonderfully disorienting, mercurial collage, Kiefermusik (1990) from a strange temporal gooch between the nearly-expired ‘80s new wave and industrial sphere, and the flood of techno and electronic music which would appear in its wake.

Crafted using materials recorded between ’84-’89 and issued on Dommert’s debut release, Early Loops & Tapes (1987), together with samples of a famous children’s radio play, plus engineering supplied by Ramon Creutzer and additional mixing/production from Heeman, Kiefermusik is effectively Dommert’s debut album proper, and one of those records that still stands far out from the time it was made, no matter what way you look at it.

From nose to tail, Kiefermusik documents a playfully searching musical spirit coming into its own, following intuitive, subconscious lines of inquiry in order to sidestep orthodoxy and stylistic mimesis and seek out the unknown and psychedelic.

It feels like a tabula rasa for experimental music, shedding the physicality and psychosexual themes of industrial music, the “exotic” of the 4th world and the pop-wise chops of new wave, and filling the space in between with a sort of lysergic, sagely abstraction that characterises an OOBE experience or waking dream.

In the first side, fluttering acoustic guitar strokes are smeared in watery figures with broadcast ephemera and cloven loops accreting sticky noise and impish murmurs but, defocus your ears a little and you’ll also hear the doppler effect of strafing autobahn traffic and unsettling, elusive atmospheric disturbances at its timbral limits - precisely the sort that will have you checking over the shoulder, on the ceiling when consumed in altered states.

The flipside offers equally scant handrails and signage. A ridiculously sped-up intro starkly contrasts with the eerie amalgamation of sound that follows, as the record spins deeper into a crevice of plasmic tones and creaking electro-acoustics laced with haphazardly radio signals and varispeed tape FX in a manner that recalls NWW at their most un/hinged.