Artist: FM Einheit
Title: Exhibition Of A Dream
Genre: Experimental
Release Date: 26th February 2021
Label: Cold Spring
Album Review
Frank Martin Strauss is probably best known for banging things, drilling things, and setting fire to things, which you have to admit is a far more worthy description than “percussionist” - his official job title of course when sat in an interview. With EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN (my autocorrect has a day in the sun with this) he helped forge a unique sound and immortal place amongst industrial and experimental music’s finest, and he’s done a fair amount of collaborating and solo projecting since leaving them.
‘Exhibition Of A Dream’ is just that - an ambitious project that takes twelve dreams by twelve dreamers, and presents them as interpretations, sonically. There’s a whole world of wordy guff you can read about this, conceptually, should you need to be convinced of the great depth and brilliance of this idea - rather like reading about an art gallery without visiting it - but I’ve decided to go in blind, since a concept should stand up alone if it indeed has the legs on which to do so.
It certainly feels almost painfully private to tip-toe through the inner workings of a person’s mind in this way, but then that’s the starkness of good art. The problem with dreams of course, is that unless you are, say, William Blake, you are simply reduced to listening to a friend enthusiastically trying to recreate the impossible for you. And because we are talking about dreams here, there’s nothing linear or straightforward about any of what’s on offer. So here we have the slowly unfolding narrative of ‘Memory’, which shifts from relaxing, to a kind of jazzy shuffle, and winds up in a random jumble of bleeps and beeps. Not entirely sure what anyone other than the dreamer gains from this, so let’s move on…
‘Alpine Traum’ sees SONIC YOUTH’s Lee Ranaldo tell his tale, weirdly sounding like some early REM album track, but again, there’s an overwhelming sense of ‘you had to be there’. There’s nothing here that makes you wish you had been though. Chuck in a bit of French avant-garde, a mind-numbing 7 minutes of ‘stuff’ happening and then not happening, and a tale of robotic sexuality and abandon that would have had me begging for sleep even within the dream, and a pattern is definitely forming. It’s all really very boring. Of course, as with all “high-art”, we mere mortals “don’t get it”. Rubbish. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that.
If you trawl through this and find something of value - some emotion, intrigue, some point to it all, then that’s great. ‘The Dungeon’ for example certainly captures some of that floating suspension of time that exists in a sleep-state, and if you’re a fan of GENESIS P-ORRIDGE you get nearly 16 minutes of narrative. It’s like a surreal episode of The Magic Roundabout. But I think you had to be there. As a concept, and an audio-visual one in an assigned space, I can see this working, as something to wander in and out of, much like dreams themselves. But let’s be honest here. It’s packaged as a double album, much like you might package any other double album, which means someone somewhere thinks you are going to sit at home and listen to this repeatedly. I doubt it. Far better to take a nice long snooze, and see what magic your own mind can conjure up, and ignore entirely this pretentious tosh.
Tracklist
01. Memory
02. Alpine Traum
03. Le Baiser Du Supion
04. Dark Dream In D
05. Death Progression
06. The Seven-Year Dream
07. FFW
08. Dream February 17 2017
09. The Dungeon
10. Un Sognio Tessuto In Tapeto
11. Joyful Pleasure
12. Creation Recreated
Line-up
FM Einheit (ex-EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN)
with voices by: Lee Ranaldo (SONIC YOUTH), Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (PSYCHIC TV / THROBBING GRISTLE), Susan Stenger (BAND OF SUSANS), Émilie Pitoiset, Erika Stucky,
Website
https://www.facebook.com/FM-EINHEIT-266076520078649 / https://coldspring.co.uk/csr292cd
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 3
Sound:3
Total: 3 / 10
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