Trepanation Markus Reuter

It's a killer driller of an album...

Trepanation
Markus Reuter

Lotuspike
August 2006

For several years now, touch guitarist Markus Reuter has been quietly making a name for himself as a talented and sensitive improviser.

Without recourse to showy grandstanding, his playing possesses a remarkable sense of accuracy when it comes to finding the emotional heart of the music.

Unlike many of his generation who appear to relish using 100 notes where often just one would do, Reuter knows enough about the hare and tortoise fable to not want to play that particular game.

Each track builds from carefully orchestrated layers, accruing over time depth and expression. Avoiding anything as obvious as a guitar solo, he uses repeating patterns and recurring loops of sound to build something substantial.

Whilst the dominant textures consist largely of pulsing threads of lo-fi organ-like notes, the external world of people and places (such as water and children playing “No Part Of Me Could Summon A Voice”) occasionally pull into sharp focus and demand attention.

Yet there’s a sense of menace in the air. The normally celebratory sounds of a firework display (“Oneness To Deceive”) are offset by dark drifting themes, suggesting the soundtrack to an outsider gazing upon a world of normality which he neither understands or cares for.

Perhaps the scariest moment on the album is “Preparation”. Dripping with apprehension it peers into a Lynchian-like flicker-lit hell-hole, crammed with foreboding and unease.

It's a dream-like album but the kind of dreams you wake up from in a sweat. If Reuter ever wanted to pursue a career scoring horror flicks then this might be his showreel.

Though lacking the rapturous uplifting feel of his 2001 album, The Longest In Terms Of Being Reuter’s instincts can be trusted to provide an engaging, thoughtful music that can get under the skin and inside the head. Trepanation is the hole in the head you do need.

You can get this album from

Lotuspike

DGM

Burning Shed