Electroton (2010)
This little remix release by Soltau and Weiss is in, electronic musical terms, a fossil. Moreover if glitch can be said to have a retro sound then this is it. However, a fossil it may be, but precious amber it surely is.
It’s hard to call glitch sumptuous but within Soltau’s minimal ambience, with its dropped pencil wooden clicks and coin caught in a vacuum clean pipe stutters, the silence is coloured and is in parts delightfully disturbing.
Weiss contributions are distinctly more accessible from a pop point of view, unpretentiously referencing Q-tip (breath and stop), Justin timberlake, Yello, Art of Noise, as well dance music in general not to mention a host of others who’ve incorporated some of the glitch aesthetic, it’s nice. We all hate nice but the groove is so tight that it almost makes me consider going to minimal glitch party for the first time in years or worse yet organising one myself…
But this isn’t simply a rehash, what makes this release stand out is that it sounds fresh. Yes, Fetischpark did Weiss’s thing first, with a gritty-sex-politik so tempting for undergraduate theses, but Rezkla is a fantastic reminder of what glitch could achieve when it was good and it is good.
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle
