Parquet by Elektro Guzzi

Elektro Guzzi deliver one of the most thrilling live performance concepts of techno and an innovative leap in the art of band performance at the very same time. They almost seem to represent the antithesis to what a band is supposed to be. While employing guitar, bass and drums only, they take the most unusual playing techniques and put them together into a rigid mechanical form where every click, pick and hit all make instant, self-evident sense. Yet, if they had not performed live extensively, becoming audience favourites from Mutek to Sónar to Berghain to Fabric, it would be hard to believe this is really how the music is created.

That said, everybody who'd seen them so far deemed it impossible they could go even further down the man-machine rabbit hole. Yet this is exactly what they did. Parquet, their second studio album, sees Elektro Guzzi in monomaniacal techno mode. Throughout the 9 tracks the distinctions between instruments and roles get completely vaporized. While their instrumental approach is at the core of their aesthetics, it really doesn’t matter anymore if one sound comes from a guitar or bass or drum – all has been merged into one sonic unit and all there is is the music as a unified entity.

While all the qualities of live performance are at hand – real time interaction, visual plausibility, instant micro-scale dynamics – this is a radical break with what group performances have been about so far. Parquet is as much a straight up club music record as it is rich of nuances and detail. Astonishingly, while being Elektro Guzzi's most rigid and dance-centered work to date, it also holds outbursts of beauty with tonal lines, ringing overtones and warm resonances. The rhythms are stripped down to the core and structured for affecting longer stretches of perception. Every track comes with a distinctive, almost 'branding'-type feature – like the hypnotic meter-shifting line of Affumicato, the gated chords of Pentagonia or the abridged rhythm of Absorber. To add to the mystique, everything was recorded directly to analog tape. No edits, no overdubs.

Founded in 2007 by Stefan Goldmann and Finn Johannsen.

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