Bernd Jestram and Ronald Lippok's 12th studio album is full of the kind of detached and surreal experimental work we've come to expect from this Berlin-based duo.
As ever, you always get the impression that their literary influences are as important as musical ones. Lyrics defy logical analysis and are like cut-ups; random snippets from found fiction.
What they call an "assimilations of texts" is most striking on Homology Itself with spoken voice and lyrics are by Viennese-Berliner poetess Ann Cotton. She imagines herself as a robot and sounds suitably cyborg-like; it is at odds with the separately recorded backing track which has a more vibrant, organic texture.
The lyrics to Log Of The Sloop and The Evening Pilgrims come from 'The Man Who Had Forgotten Trees' by British poet Milner Place. Place's sensory impressions are a good match for Lippok's monotonic 'alien in exile' delivery so that, for example, he can refer to "a wind that smells of distances" with deadpan precision.
Other songs are like odes to inanimate objects such as The Tape ("what channel are you trying to get?") and the "too many fingers to fit" of The Glove.
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The emotional coldness creates an overall sense of foreboding so that when,on Coconut Signal, Lippok sings "we were waiting with the lights out" you can't help wondering: 'waiting for what?'
Overall the thirteen tracks, which include four short instrumentals, tend to suggest movement yet at the same time have an eerily static quality. For this reason it seems entirely apt that the cover art should depict a photo of a deserted runway.
'Adrift' usually denotes a state of being without moral or physical support or guidance. However, with the album as soundtrack, the word implies a feeling of floating free of constraints where the sense of purpose is well-defined even though the final destination remains a mystery.
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