Artist.......: Pom Pom
Album........: CD 001
Label........: Pom Pom
Genre........: Techno
Catnr........: POM CD 001
source.......: CDDA
rip.date.....: Mar-03-2009
str.date.....: 000-00-0000
quality......: VBR/44,1Hz/Joint-Stereo
Url..........: n/a
track title time
01. Untitled 04:01
02. Untitled 03:19
03. Untitled 06:03
04. Untitled 03:35
05. Untitled 05:24
06. Untitled 05:17
07. Untitled 04:39
08. Untitled 04:07
09. Untitled 03:42
10. Untitled 04:00
11. Untitled 03:01
12. Untitled 03:20
13. Untitled 07:39
14. Untitled 03:56
Runtime 62:03 min
Size 65,0 MB
Release Notes:
Anonymity is almost impossible these days, it
seems. 2008 saw Burial reveal himself, Basic
Channel and Underground Resistance became regular
fixtures on the festival circuit and Wolfgang
Voigt's moves were covered on these pages almost
daily, the MySpace generation clearly forcing all
and sundry to come out of hiding. Fortunately, not
quite all: The shadowy Pom Pom have been beavering
away in obscurity since 2001, releasing untitled
tracks in text-free, "none-blacker" vinyl-only
editions, no information available aside from
gushing blurbs on the Kompakt website. ("Totally
exciting new techno from Berlin. Drexcia-inspired
genius druggy stuff!")
In a culture currently collapsing from promotion-
overload, this information-void is particularly
appealing. And Pom Pom's clunky brand of techno
only adds to the charmùbrazenly hand-crafted,
functional, but with little interest in fads or
genre conventions, this is weird stuff. It sounds
like the product of Berghain mated with Profan:
dark, reverb-dunked rhythms lost in pools of tape
hiss, divergent patterns causing further confusion,
crudely sampled patches of static. Pom Pom is
Marcel Dettmann meets Marcel Marceau; punishing,
but with tongue-in-cheek and a playful glint in its
eye. If T. Raumschmiere is techno's punk-rock, then
Pom Pom is its No Wave.
The CD features 14 tracks, most of them around five
minutes in length, which gives the tunes the feel
of studies or experiments of the sort found on old
sound library collections. Simple themes are
quickly established, then quickly discarded. The
opening track is a waltz, a Strauss lollipop loping
in dank dubstep terrain, until track 2 stomps in,
offering a beautifully hackneyed take on Minus
minimal, the trademark claves and congas lazily
daubed in charcoal. Loops of hiss bleed into
ghostly warning tones in track 5, pseudo Latin
rhythms stumbling over clattering electro breaks,
while track 7 loses grand trance themes in thick
fog, pads and drums distorting, bleeding into the
surrounding mist.
The palate remains firmly monochromatic, all dub
techno greys draped over minimal drum patterns, but
the manner in which these buckle, twisting into
surprisingly obtuse forms, lends vitality to these
simple pieces. The warped arpeggios which stagger
zombie-like all over track 6 are stunning, and
would surely send crowded floors into a frenzy.
Track 8 is just as cocky, with tambourines and
gushing strings cycling like The Field. Track 10
re-examines the riff from Supermayer's "Two Of Us,"
submerging it in darker waters and throwing in
ragged jazz breaks to disrupt the flow. Calmer
pieces recall Rechenzentrum or Mikkel Metal, with
stoned rhythms lurching around dying dub pulses and
barbed synth pads. There's not a bum note in sight.
Or, rather, the bum notes are so artfully deployed
that each track develops skewed and eccentric
personalities, absent from all but the most
innovative of modern productions.