Perceptively highlighting and occupying a space between music and noise in a relatively rare solo outing, Werner Dafeldecker places over 30 years of recording experience with the European and global avant cognoscenti at the service of an unfathomably deep sound bound to quench any discerning thirst for abstract, mystifying electro acoustic music. While perhaps best known as a consummate collaborator who’s recorded with everyone from Fennesz to Valerio Tricoli, DJ Hell and Pan Daijing, this album identifies him as a master not only of the acoustic sphere, but now also electro-acoustic dimensions.
Manifest in a mix of spongiform shapes, bobbing clanks and laminal flows, Parallel Darks leaves its mark in two contrasting ways that speak to the breadth and depth of Dafeldecker’s imagination and technical faculties. The first side bubbles up with lacquer-crackling texturhythms that move omnidirectional from an absent centre, working in a perpetual metric flux where, if you squint ears hard enough, harmonic forms appear to emerge only to be consumed by the swell just as quickly. It’s difficult to grasp any sides or centre to the piece and that’s where it really comes into its own in a heavily satisfying, psychedelic manner.
By turns the B-side feels more aggressive and foreboding. Any semblance of meter is ripped like rug from under your feet to model an impossible physics of sound where a keening, billowing black mass teeters on pin legs, fringed by the barely-perceptible sound of human breathing and birdcalls that make for a wonderfully perplexing blend of dark and light themes, and paradoxes of weight/lessness, space/density and dematerialised texture as rhythm.