Monolith Cocktail Blog

ALBUM REVIEW/DOMINIC VALVONA

Hackedepicciotto ‘Keepsakes’
(Mute) 28^th July 2023

Responsible, in part at least, to helping shape a certain darkened yearned and dramatic sound over the last four decades in Berlin, the husband and wife partnership of Alexander Hacke and Danielle de Picciotto have at any one time, both separately and together, been in Einstürzende Neubauten, Crime And The City Solution and the Anne Sexton Transformations imbued theatrical Ministry Of Wolves. During that time Danielle also co-founded the famous Love Parade carnival. And so it’s unsurprising to find the influence of many of those bands rubbing off on them with this latest album for the highly influential Mute label. It’s a signature sound that could be described as a cabaret and soundtrack gravitas of post-punk, post-industrial, electronica, the esoteric, weird folk and twisted fairytale.

Ministry Of Wolves co-conspirator Mick Harvey (both as a foil to Cave and as a solo artist) and CATCS can be heard suffused throughout with a more distilled taste of Neubauten. However, it’s the history, spectacle of a Neapolitan environment that’s really got to them; the city’s legendary Auditorium Novecento and its stock of various instruments played host to the “symbiotic” entwined duo. The spirit of such early-recorded crooners and composers as Enrico Caruso, in one of Europe’s first recording studios, hangs in the air. And amongst the tubular bells, the brass and grand piano Ennio Morricone’s twinkled and xylophone-like chimed sounding celeste is put to good use across an album of dedications to close friends. For Keepsakes is (despite the cliché) the couple’s most personal, intimate album yet.

Following in the wake of the lockdown epoch produced The Silver Threshold (one of my favourite albums of 2021), which offered heightened snatches of beauty, romance and drama from a backdrop of the Biblical, cinematic and ominous (the last two attributes spilling over into this album), Keepsakes is partially autobiographical in style and content. Like a sonic, musical photo album, except far too cerebral to name or make explicit the people behind each track, they use a lyrical description, language and narration to build those pictures, feelings and terms of endearment. There’s no mention in the accompanying album press, but it didn’t take me long to find that the harder edged, gnarled and classical counterpoint ‘Aichach’ could only be a dedication to that small Bavarian town’s native electronic dance music pioneer, Chrislo Haas – it was either the late provocateur of the German New Wave or the infamous Ilse Koch, the “concentration camp murderess”, “witch of Buchenwald”, who topped herself after being imprisoned for life by the Americans in the late 1940s at that town’s women’s prison to chose from. Haas was an integral agitator as part of Liasions Dangereuses, Minus Delta F, D.A.F. and Der Plan (the last three of which he co-founded), and his own proto punk and Tresor techno signature can be heard racing against sorrowful bowed strings on an instrumental that’s both sadly poignant and yet has a scuzzy, heavy attitude. It must be noted that Haas died in 2004, at the age of only 47. A premature end from where I’m standing.

On the other hand, I’m guessing and stretching the subject of the Weimer jazz age noir and Brecht magic show ‘Schwarze Milch’. Featured last month in the June Digest, I said that the title translated as “black milk” and could be a reference to the German-Mongolian film drama of the same name by the director Uisenma Burchu, who also stars in it. And yet that Steppes liberated tale of culture-clashed sisters couldn’t be further removed from the odd cabaret sift and brushed, hurdy-gurdy winded and smoky sax circus of the playful, disturbed and animal-mask wearing cultish: I really adore it.

Apart from that the bestial, throat song from the bowels of the chthonian ‘Mastodon’, could be evoking the unholy, leviathan-invoking American heavy metal band of that title. The track is certainly darker, ghostly and has shades of John Carpenter and late Scott Walker. Yet there’s also weeping strings, Ennio’s struck bell tolls and a removed vision of the Italian maestro’s Westerns scores.

I’ve deduced that ‘La Femme Sauvage’, or “wild woman”, is a book and a film – also a recurring French storytelling trope of women brought up in the wilds by wolves and such. Sound wise it has more of that Ennio influence, mixed with a poetically spooked version of chanson, and a descriptive autobiographical, numerical, narrated part by Hacke: “three languages”, “four books” and “36 years in Berlin”. The celeste is very nicely chimed, as bulb-like notes ring out in the midst of a theremin dreamy yarn.

The album’s finale, ‘The Blackest Crow’, riffs – as only these two enchanters can – on the old American folk song. An American Gothic transformation, with the sound of waves evoking a bookend farewell, shipped off on tail sails – very much in keeping with the similar atmospheric, lapping tidal ‘Troubadour’ opener – this Appalachian and Ozarks provenance song of departed lovers in a cold, dark world is a perfect curtain call of unified plaint: an esoteric Carter Family. Thought to have emerged after the 1860s Civil War, the main lyrical theme of metaphorical crows, glass breasts, remains after infinite changes, additions and subtractions. Even the title can be different: ‘The Lover’s Lament’ in Carl Sandburg’s 1927 published The American Songbook, but also known as ‘My Dearest Dear’ and ‘The Time Draws Near’ – the former sounding more appropriate in this case. ‘The Troubadour’ itself has an air of something older about it; an essence of Tchaikovsky enchanted celeste with the courtly echoes of the Elizabethan.   

In the more menacing stakes, ‘Songs Of Gratitude’ is a dramatic soundtrack of Walker with Sunn O))), Dead Can Dance and Brian Reitzell subterranean and scuzz strains: Hackedpicciotto entering the underworld with a song of yearned thanks.

The sound of Berlin with stopovers across Europe and New York City, Keepsakes conjures up evocative visions, dramas and characters out if the arty, the gothic, the cerebral and surreal; creating an alternative photo album and collection of memories, events. As earthy as it is dreamily floating in a constructed world of fairytale, myth and magic, the creatively sagacious couple draws upon a lifetime of experiences, friendships to produce another captivating album for the Mute label.