Motown via Germany on a razor's edge

A certain formalist, purist logic pervades most of the rigidly minimal Cologne techno scene from which Brinkmann emerged two years ago. A stripped-down, constricting 4/4 pulse, inevitable layering and peeling away of percussion sections, meticulously disorienting stereo panning, faceless series of 12-inch singles—all feel like programmatically schematized installments in the quest for...

For what? In music this single-minded, there's no perfect beat, no sample to make the brain hiccup or the heart leap, no dancefloor orgasm. While it's often quite enchanting, this brand of would-be future music smashes into the same dead ends which bloodied modern art. Remove the twin pleasures of recognizable substance and craft, and all you're left with is ideology chasing its own tail, munching itself down to a soggy Cheerio of its former self.

But Brinkmann exempts himself, at least a little, by using the "real" and the "physical" to wrench a hermetically sealed world open a little bit wider. Mike Ink and Jeorg Burger did a Roxy Music tribute on last year's Las Vegas and Pole brought in broken-down crackle dub on CD1. Brinkmann, however, is truly catholic in his sensibility. Most of his sounds are sourced directly from vinyl: a razored notch makes a snare sound, surface noise adds textures, a handmade multiple tonearm set-up phases and distorts the snippets he picks out. On some of his innumerable self-released records, he's patched snatches of Thelonius Monk, Rakim, and musique concrete into crazy-quilts, while on another, he distills the beat to two pops playing tag for 22 minutes a side.

But now Brinkmann brings it all back home to Detroit, begetter of techno and some of the best-oiled pop machinery of all time. As he would have it, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas hum and harmonize over a squelching click track, and a chicken-scratch guitar lick mutates a hissing hi-hat into a crashing denouement. Sometimes he returns to Cologne, as on "Walk with Me," which is all strutting percussion and stumbling echoes—Brink-mann staring off into space without tripping once. But the apex comes on "Let's Go," as a preacher clears the way for a bone-nasty acid bassline and a blendered "C'mon y'all! Let's go! Down to the disco!"

Only Brinkmann could bring together the immersive depths of German minimalism and the testifying soul of American pop without the end result becoming a poorly conceived ethnographic exercise or an overwrought diva-fest. "Hear ye! Hear ye! The cold sin session! The cold sin session! Now here come the judge. Here come the judge." The judge indeed. (W.v.B. Enterprises/NL)

—Sam Frank

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