New Music Monday: B. Fleischmann

Feb 4 • Blog • 86 Views • No Comments

By Nick Mattos, PQ Monthly

In today’s New Music Monday, be oddly comforted by the sounds of Austrian electronic musician B. Fleischmann.

Born in 1975, Bernard Fleischmann (who goes by the first initial of his first name) started his musical life as a drummer; however, in the 1990′s he enthusiastically took to the medium of electronica. His first full-length album, 1999′s Pop Loops for Breakfast, introduced his signature blend of highly personal and at-times disorienting combination of glitch music and synth-pop. Since then, Fleischmann has released eight full-length albums, most recently 2012′s I’m Not Ready for the Grave Yet.

In a review of Fleischmann’s charmingly-titled 2008 release Angst is not a Weltanschauung! Pitchfork’s Roque Strew looks at how the musician plays with the medium and its ethos to create a surprisingly jovial take on electronic music:

Bernhard Fleischmann makes it look easy, turning out sensitive electronica thick with detail and feeling… Refreshingly light on self-seriousness, as the title likely gave away, Angst still manages to move. That upbeat exclamation, the kind of thing you imagine a Hegel professor yelling at his undergraduates, is dead right as a descriptor of Fleischmann’s own musical bent. Since… [his first releases, Fleischmann] has commanded a broad emotional palette absent in the ominous monotony and thoughtlessly turgid textures of that whole generation of cookie-cutter Aphex Twin copycats. All the way up to this most recent release, recorded in the wake of a friend’s death, Fleischmann’s subtly uplifting tunes have never lost the through-line of melancholy that winds back to his Morr Music debut, Pop Loops for Breakfast. Angst continues that upward curve of building complexity and nuance, owing no small debt to the chorus of new, colorful, delicate voices that, to take a phrase from his closing song, fill up Fleischmann’s castles of memory.

Check out videos for “I’m Not Ready for the Grave Yet,” “Don’t Follow,” and the fan-created “Static Grate.” What’s not to love?