Incredible compilation assembled by, and including nonetheless than Brannten Schnüre. Gathering together unreleased tracks by Vox Populi! Limpe Fuchs, Läuten der Seele, Christoph Heeman and more, this is the most pleasant surprise we could get from Quirlschlängle. Still two months before Christmas, but the greatest gift is already here.
"Nebengleis“ is one of those strange and rare German words that seem to be born both out of the dust of a bureaucratic, functional grammar and a wild yearning to escape the tight fabric of this material world. „Nebengleis“ translates as „side-track“, the track on which abandoned and unused waggons are being left upon. Waiting to be pulled out into the blue of distance again or slowly corroding, fragmentising within the uncoiling threads of time. For a while, for ever. Unnoticed, unhinged. Not seen by the tired eyes of the busy day-to-day traveller that hops on this train, that train, always running from the main-track. Inspired by the almost cosmogonal qualities of obscure and cult compilations like „Terra Serpentes“ or „Music The World Does Not See“ and guided by an infallible artistic instinct, Christian Schoppik (Brannten Schnüre / Läuten der Seele) has curated a record that flourishes with an unconditional love for things that are otherwise unseen, tales that are untold, small fabulous creatures that are stuck in between this world and the pantheon of better-canonised mythologies. There rests a funny haziness between the semantics of the words to curate, to care and to cure. Cure what?, you will ask. An unearthly frightfulness to be at wrong pace with the rest of the world. And then take this fright and turn it into a celebration, a paean to all the crooked, hidden ways of being creative, of being otherwise alive. Making music on the side-track however doesn't necessarily mean to be structurally marginalised by whatever powers are in control to do so. If there is a programmatic aspect to this compilation it's clearly not a political one but something that is purely poetic. „Musik vom Nebengleis“ is an inter-generational and inter-continental gathering of artists whose spiritual kinship runs deep into near-mythical terrain and transcends the limitations of genre or being part of any particular scene. The first side of the record is introduced by a soft spoken love poem, recited in Farsi by Mitra from legendary French ethno-industrial outift Vox Populi!. Much like Christoph Heemann (Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa) and Limpe Fuchs (Anima-Sound) Vox Populi! have continously shaped their very own oblique artistic language within the experimental underground for several decades already. But there is also a younger generation of „Nebengleis“ artists, probably much influenced by the aforementioned names, and waiting to be discovered by those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
There are obscure post-everything outlaws like Californian brothers NAVE! And Pareido Wolv from the Via Injection label, there's the almost mythical and impossible-to-track-down Margot from Greece and immensely gifted misfits, rarely seen even within the in any case elusive post-industrial cosmos like Niedowierzanie, Cardevore from Barcelona and Lithuanian folk-drone alchemist Skeldos who introduces the second side of the record with his poem „aidai, artimesni už garsą“ („echoes closer than sound“), touching on an oneiric experience of nature that communicates with cosmic realities beyond the mundane, a theme that is intrinsically persistent throughout the whole compilation. HTRK`s Jonnine contributes one of her haunting home-recorded sketches, more scéance than song. Another continent, another nexus of influences – and yet: same energy, same spirit. And then there's Schoppik himself and his friends from the German „Gespensterland“: Brannten Schnüre, Kirschstein, Baldruin and Läuten der Seele, carefully connecting the dots between folklore, NDW and ambient, between ghost story and nursery rhyme in an imaginary playbook for alternative realities. This web of different realities mirrors another facet of the auratic nature of the side-track. It's a string of narratives or perceptions that run parallel to the narration of our daily routines, being somehow part of it but not bound by the limitations of what matters in the world of economic power struggles. There is no power here – only the infinite unfolding of glimmering possibilities. When the soul has entered this zone, all music, no matter what, Christoph Heemann's hypnotic drones as much as Cardevore's dramatic outsider gloom, can contribute to this celebration of possibilities with its own messy unique sound. It's always a peculiar sound, small and diffident at first and then quietly triumphant, the sound of Bruno Schulz' „last and radiant countermarch of the imagination“, the sound of Gelsomina's bittersweet trumpet playing through the bleak but beautiful black and white of Fellini's „La Strada“, the darkly ambigous hum that sits behind every éducation sentimentale in film or literature or life itself, the creak of each and every „piece of chalk to follow the contours of what is not, or is no longer, or is not yet“. (Margot Benetti)
