This is a bit of an old thread but I never got around to responding at the time. I recommend that people check out Philip's interview with TB at: www.urbansounds.com/us_current/thumbnail/brinkmann_1.html (It inspired me).
TB's Soul Center releases certainly reveal a transformational sampling ethic at work that gives rise to tracks sounding anything but "weak" or "tired." Though a KDJ might initially wonder who in the funk this guy thinks he is, Brinkmann's stirring conviction (ably shown in his tracks & in the interview), that techno represents "a very spiritual thing," would surely win him over. Respect & empathy mark these projects as a challenging, ritualistic honoring of Black cultural memory, a form of tribute saturated in funk--the "Right\Sh*t." As others like Philip, Tristan & Matt have pointed out, this is a case involving seriously good music, with the sampling of soul classics done in a righteous, innovative spirit. Could this be the future 'sound of young America'? As TB states to Philip, "there's a kind of catalytic process, something is going through you, the history behind you." This history hovers as sepia-toned presence over the second cd's ambiguous back-cover image: an apparently blood-stained hand of indeterminate color cradles a tiny dove which could be newly born, sleeping, or perhaps dead. The hand of fate saving the spirit of peace? Peace forever crushed by power/war? Oblique homage to the civil rights movement? A reminder of violence past, & still to come, in various struggles? Does the photo conjure up a sense of morning or mourning? Hard to say, but extremely evocative... Still, getting back to KDJ's rather intemperate attack in his liner notes to 'Silent Introduction', I think it is virtually impossible to hear the Soul Center recordings & not be struck by their strangeness. Brinkmann accentuates the auratic quality of his samples from Stax, Motown, etc., creating a distancing effect that permeates the music. This uncanny quality, a 'making strange' not really due to language differences, finds its center in the samples themselves. That's where the soul lives, nurtured by the minimal techno equivalent of a funk skeleton crew. Where does this strangeness come from? Brinkmann's recontextualization of disembodied voices & sounds raises parallels with the psycho-sonic occultism of Coil. The Ester Brinkmann recordings reveal some of the same fervor for arcane exploration. 'Klick', with its percussive, malignant-sounding patterns --evoking the whirring of spirits--remains his most terrifyingly effective experiment to my ears. But the emphasis on the auditory as a threshold state of (psychic) communion achieves startling realization with the unsettled & unsettling grooves of Soul Center, as well. This house is haunted, Jack. Perhaps some of the strangeness derives from the unnaturalness of the recording process itself. Brinkmann's cryptic approach to sampling ultimately has historical ties with the sepulchral character of material sound preservation (storing the dead), a practice which paradoxically has as its aim the invocation of the spirited, lifelike performance (raising the dead). In effect, sonic reproduction relies on the technological ability to (re)incarnate the absent sound-making agent in an audio format, thus generating the illusion of actual presence. When Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, these sound reproducers functioned as primitive voice samplers, "talking machines," & were regarded in somewhat magical terms, half-mockingly described as possessing little humans (or at least automatons), that toiled within their workings. We still refer to vinyl's 'warmth' when it comes to sonic reproduction today, though for many years this aspect was cause for suspicion; the ability to preserve 'living' spirits & channel them (in mono, then in stereo), carried sinister overtones for many listeners. After Edison, recording archives rapidly filled with the songs, sounds & voices of the departed, immortalized in sound form, rendered metaphorically undead in spirit, & materializable out of the ether at the flick of a switch, or the drop of a needle. Any notion of 'soul' takes on extra freight in such a context; it is that which refuses to pass away, but lives on, an inspiration (or deterrent) to others. To record was & is always to take a strange, even unnatural stab at immortality, to send a message into an unknowable future toward the ears of the as yet unborn. Techno finds much of its impetus here, & resonates closely with Breton's maxim that the "work of art is valuable only in so far as it is vibrated by the reflexes of the future." The future constantly listens in, as it were, in advance of itself. These Soul Center projects are geared towards this future in prophetic, politicized terms, as they forecast a kind of inevitable homecoming--despite the unhomely, defamiliarized feel they emit at present. Perhaps this yearning represents only a strange dream of possibility...of unity; a hallucinatory dream brewed up with The Temps in a psychedelic shack session. (Well, TB does credit Lu Sky D on the second disc!) Brinkmann's homage, steeped in cultural memory, builds on a sense of strangeness or estrangement, a sense that dead souls are still present & living through sound, speaking anew now & to those waiting to be born. This is nostalgia for an age yet to come, channeled through the spirit medium of the sampler. It possesses a strangeness redolent of Lynch's best work (fire, "Walk with Me," anyone?) A tense air of expectancy hangs over events on many tracks like an unresolved chord, or a strange fruit, generating an atmosphere of carnivalesque dread. Rhythms & samples come together in jarring, mesmeric patterns, yet release is tantalizingly withheld. All the while, the sonic pressure rises--a funk time-bomb primed for the day when they'll be truly dancing in the street. Regarding the releases he voices under the name of his long-dead sister, Brinkmann states: "Most of the Ester Brinkmann projects are playing with death, with people who are not living anymore, but still living in spirit. They are still powerful today." Something similar appears to be going on with the Soul Center projects. But these revolutionary invocations invite participation not in some frozen spectral or aesthetically-isolated afterlife, but in forging connections to new, unknown modes of being, & to the 'colored universe' we are daily in the process of becoming. Finally, these records invite dissolution of our bodies in the alchemically-charged darkness of the dance floor, an imaginary temple of the true spirit where, ultimately, all of us turn invisible, strafed & spaced by fresh variants on those "beam[s] of lyrical sound" Ellison's man heard Louis Armstrong emit. TB has harnessed some of that liberating, laser-like energy as well, shining a resonant light deep into the future/past. Wes
