Monolith Cocktail Blog

Album Review: Words: Andrew C. Kidd





Welcoming our newest guest writer to the Monolith Cocktail fold, Andrew C. Kidd pens a most philosophical purview of the recently-released About B. collection of reworked and previously unreleased “memory sketches”, by the German-based composer Tim Linghaus.

Tim Linghaus ‘About B. (Memory Sketches B-Sides Recordings)’
(Sound In Silence) 18th January 2019

“Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life”, postulated the lauded German writer and academic W. G. Sebald in what would be his last published interview¹. After listening to About B. (Memory Sketches B-Sides Recordings), I am left ruminating on Sebald’s statement highlighting the inexorable influence of memory.

Memory has been the focus of other experimental musicians. One such project that comes to mind is Everywhere at the End of Time, the bold, six-album series written by The Caretaker, a pseudonym of James Leyland Kirby, that chronicles the gradual diminution and distortion of memory in the context of Alzheimer’s disease. Unlike Kirby, Tim Linghaus does not pursue a linear narrative in his wistfully elegant collection. Instead, his 17 compositions are sketches, or rather, brief snapshots in time that seek to capture the subtle moments that occur in a life.

Although About B. (Memory Sketches B-Sides Recordings) does not follow a linear course, to suggest that Linghaus considers memory to be non-linear would be incorrect. His interpretation of the linearity of memory, or to put it simply, the idea of memory as a continuum with our self-development in present day being highly influenced by memories of the past and future memories unconsciously being shaped by past events, occurs through a series of recurring motifs. These include the distinct but detached sounds of radio static, the familiar crackle of a vinyl record spinning atop a platter and the muffled warmth of the mechanical assembly of hammers hitting piano strings as keys are pressed. He also captures the often fleeting and frustratingly fragmented aspects to memory through the periodicity of his analogue synth arpeggios and the ephemeral nature of many of the pieces (some are as short as 30 seconds).

Devoid of intelligible words (the dreamy Where Is My Girl does feature a disguised vocal harmony), I do wonder whether Linghaus has opted for the piano as an instrument to represent his ‘voice’. The warm tonality of the piano, or perhaps even temperament (in the piano tuning sense), evokes many emotions. Snow at Franz-Mehring-Platz is melancholic. Anatomy Of Our Awkward Farewell Gestures springs into a slow waltz and contradicts the other pieces around it. The piano notes on Chased By Two Idiots are long and sustained; this track engenders a feeling of darkness which is further augmented by the deep bass-sequence and the glassy drone noises.

People listening to Tim Linghaus will of course draw comparisons to the German-born British composer Max Ritcher, particularly when presented with the complex rhythmic structure on Before Berlin (About B. End Title), the legato played on Jonathan Brandis and the plaintive strings that flood over I Was Atom And Waves (Reprise, Pt. II). The shifts of tone colour on Repetitive Daydream Sequence, Pt. VI (Humboldt University Chemistry Class 1975) are very reminiscent of the American producer Oneohtrix Point Never and his Russian Mind EP (No Fun Production, 2013). The oscillated rhythms of Looking For Dad In Radio Noise (Reprise, Pt. III) and Plaenterwald are akin to the now disbanded group, Emeralds; in particular, their Does It Look Like I’m Here? LP (Editions Mego, 2010).

Of the 17 tracks on About B. (Memory Sketches B-Sides Recordings), 4 are reworked versions of compositions from a previous album. Only Linghaus will know whether he calls the memories that featured on his debut album differently. Alternatively, these recollected memories may indeed be the same, but perhaps on further introspection he felt it necessary to make alterations to the original interpretations to better record their deeper meaning. Nevertheless, memory is a thoroughly complex faculty and an extremely difficult subject to explore and document. I applaud Tim Linghaus in his attempt to preserve his memories in the form of music.



¹Jaggi M. The Last Word. The Guardian [newspaper on the Internet] 2001 Dec 12 [cited 2019 February 5].