Apparat - "Walls"

Apparat - Limelight (Shitkatapult 2007)

Apparat – Walls / Shitkatapult

For better or worse, sometimes albums get lost among the shuffle here at Audiversity HQ. My living room/to-do table is covered in CDs, probably about 60 at the moment, all separated into various, loosely denominative stacks and each in a very weak priority order (75% of which actually need to be listened to). Each week a new slew of albums gets placed on top of the piles, and CDs I have yet to get to sadly get buried further into the clutter. Needless to say, it’s an imperfect system. Well Saturday’s all-out work-a-thon had me digging into the depths of my options and I finally popped the latest Apparat full-length, Walls, into the player for the first time. Released mid-May and probably sitting right in front of me for the last two months, I sorely overlooked Sascha Ring’s fourth official full-length solo outing. A skittering electro-acoustic Technicolor affair, Walls truly lives up to the brilliantly sweeping and wonderfully colorful and chaotic mix-medium art work that graces the cover.

For me personally, I think the freshest aspect of Walls is how much it does not sound like the current Berlin scene (or at least my assumption of it). It’s overtly melodic, emotional and sentimental, three characteristics not typically associated with electronica music, but handled masterfully in the hands of a man who knows his way around a set of knobs. And most importantly, it is a varied affair. Ring approaches his music with characteristics ranging from the twinkling classical minimalism of Reich to the blippy R&B of Milosh, and presents it in a well-balanced diet of dancefloor bangers, romantic ballads and soundtrack-worthy instrumentals. All the while, a consistent palette of colors is utilized in the tone to create a state of cohesiveness. Obviously, Walls is an album in the best definition of the term: an exploration, statement and story told with synths, drum machines and lush acoustic instrumentation.

Along for the tale are a few of Ring’s more musically talented friends, most notably sultry vocalist Raz Ohara and the similarly-minded Josh Eustis of Telefon Tel Aviv, who is responsible for the tone tweaking and final mixdown of the album. While Ring’s sexy compositions of soft-hued synths and creatively syncopated drum patterns are mostly responsible for Walls’ seductive appeal, Ohara’s Prince-lite vocals certainly help the cause. He is only featured on four of the thirteen tracks, but for more vocal-oriented, classic-song-structure music fans, they are your go-to tracks. “Hailin from the Edge” and “Holdon” push the boundaries of slow-dance techno tracks with near anthemic choruses, while later on “Headup” and “Over and Over” are more in the vein of slow-burning ballads (though the former still has an epic climax).

For my personal tastes, I dig the tracks that mix in his post-techno synthcapades with post-classical chamber music. Album opener, “Not a Number”, teams Reich-like elliptical loops of vibraphone with tinges of white noise, synth tones and strings, while the disc comes to a close with “Like Porcelain,” a mirrored sound utilizing similar electronic tones in place of the vibes. “Birds” successfully pairs sweeping strings and xylophone pings with a skittering drum beat, electronic noodles and Ring’s subdued vocals (which aren’t too unlike Ohara’s). As far as the more traditional Apparat numbers are concerned, “Limelight” takes the medal with its increasingly ecstatic layers of synth melodies and deep thudding drum machine.

Though my knowledge of most Berlinian electronica and the Shitkatapult roster itself is minimal at best, I would venture to say Ring is skittering on a completely different level with Walls than most of his contemporaries. If anything, its appeal to outsiders of the scene like myself is all the proof you need. It does a great job of capturing that wonderful sexy pop appeal of the early 80s electro-pop while keeping the genre wholeheartedly looking forward. There is a reason the Apparat moniker has risen to the top of the cramped, contemporary Berlin scene, and Walls should be all the explanation you need.