Kreidler live with beer.
Photo: IMAGO/Funke Photo Services/Udo MILBRET
Sometimes a myth is difficult to eliminate. This is the case with the city of Düsseldorf, which is not only the state capital of North Rhine-Westphalia and the (at least unofficial) federal capital of the rich and beautiful, but has also been considered the mythical epicenter of electronic sound art since the early 1970s. This legend was once nurtured by pioneers such as Kraftwerk, La Düsseldorf and Neu!, who were celebrated as musical avant-gardists even more abroad than at home. Since the early 1990s, the Düsseldorf trio Kreidler has been involved, and they recently released their 16th album, “Twists (A Visitor Arrives).”
But it is by no means the case that the band would continue in a retro-fixated and ahistorical manner what their predecessors had started two decades earlier. On the contrary, in the early days Kreidler were influenced, among other things, by the emerging techno, but were aware of history enough to also appreciate those stylistic predecessors who had made its emergence at the end of the 80s possible. In addition to the classic Düsseldorf school of the first generation, these included Dub and the post-rock that was emerging at the time – especially the Chicago school around bands like Tortoise. But the trio also showed no fear of classic pop elements.
That hasn’t changed on the album “Twists (A Visitor Arrives)”, which, compared to its predecessor “Spells and Daubs”, once again focuses more on acoustic elements. The band starts off extremely groovy with the first two tracks “Polaris” and “Tanger Telex”. The latter enriches Timucin Dündar with sparse saxophone melodies, who complements the current line-up of the two founding members Thomas Klein and Andreas Rehse as well as Alexander Paulick on the track, making him one of four guest musicians on the record. Not least because of his contribution, the basic atmosphere of the track evokes distant memories of “Blackstar”, the last and at the same time jazziest record of David Bowie, who was also an avowed fan of Kreidler during his lifetime.
“Loisaida Sisters,” on the other hand, is similarly rhythmic but less dark, featuring guest vocals from Khan of Finland and, with its nervous synthesizer tracks and intricate rhythms, evoking memories of new wave bands like Heaven 17 or Depeche Mode. In “Hopscotch,” however, Kreidler once again underline their ingenious ability, adapted from their Kraut ancestors, to successively bring about trance-like states of mind through the stoic repetition of a single musical theme.
As usual, the nine tracks on “Twists (A Visitor Arrives)” move somewhere between avant-garde and pop, acoustic and electronic, old and new. The album ends with the atmospheric “Kandili,” which features calm ambient surfaces in the first half before a dynamic tombeat plays its way to the foreground and finally erupts in the tense finale.
And the myth of Düsseldorf is still alive in 2024.
Kreidler: »Twists (A Visitor Arrives)« (Bureau B)
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