WOEBOT

FLANGER
SPIRITUALS
NONPLACE

Flanger is the joint project of Senor Coconut, Mr. Uwe Schmidt and Burnt Friedman collaborator with Jaki Liebezeit and orchestrator of The Nu Dub Players. "Spirituals" will be their fourth album, and the first not to be associated with the Ninja Tune label. As such it's evidence of the ongoing proclivity of their collaboration, surely a rarity in the field of fly-by-night musical encounters.

Readers familiar with German-born Schmidt's playful bossa-nova reworkings of Kraftwerk and Friedman's glitch-inlected takes on Dub and Funk will recognise the tensions here between the authentic and fake, naturalised and alien. Though in "Spirituals" whose Angel Heart-style tracks ape New Orleans second-line motifs and reproduce early jazz's sinuous torch-songs their tactics may have become problematic. By invoking early Jazz they may have performed an implausible theoretical leap. Here is a music which had scant connections to the recording process itself, the sort of connections which the typical practitioners of "Glitch" music foreground. Unlike the duo's earlier experiments there is no thread within the Basin Street Blues which can be conceptualised through teasing out and embellishment in the manner that Friedman's dub attempts to "out-dub" the original. The recreation itself thus becomes surreal. In the case of the Senor Coconut project, the brutal contrast between the original and the copy lent a humour, but precisely what is gained in this contextualisation?

It's true that the duo make suggestive stabs in the form of tracks like "In My Car" (Single Mix) which cheekily adds a patina of vinyl crackle to the recording but elsewhere technology and artifice is almost wholly transparent. The listener has to fall back on the recording itself with its (albeit playful) mannered sepia-tinted tunes, cliched saxaphones and faintly naff overwrought vocals; "Crime In the Pale Moonlight" somewhat ironically spoilt by anonymous crooning. Unfortunately all this serves to pitch the project gently into the terrain of the Woody Allen Band.