- Soylent Green creeps into your soul. Far from the bombastic impacts of Flügel’s Alter Ego releases like ‘Rocker’, ‘Transphormer’, ‘Betty Ford’ or the police-whistle follies of ‘Gehts Noch’, each Soylent Green release has been a quiet masterpiece of restraint. There’s something limpid about a lot of these tracks; they recall the stillness of the old classics - and so they are. This isn’t a Soylent Green album; it’s a collection that gathers together ten pieces written over the past decade.
‘Low Pt. 1’, written in 1996, with its burbling groove and spooky atmospherics, remains under the spell of its own hypnotic presence. ‘On the Balcony’, released on the eponymous EP by Playhouse in 2000, sounds better with every year that passes. None of these tracks sounded like much at the time - there’s very little to a Soylent Green track, but only in the George Clinton sense of ‘funk is what you don’t play.’ It’s not so much about sharp hooks, big stabs, bombastic intros or screamin’ bitches – each track swings around one hypnotic funk. One notion under a groove. There’s magic in the circuits – like the best music of The Hieroglyphic Being or the masterworks of Larry Heard Jamal Moss seeks to evoke, its the poetry of autopoeisis, the beauty of the sounds the machines make on their own. Like Moss or Heard, Flügel has the knack for channelling Jack – you don’t ‘produce’ tracks like this, you make yourself the conduit for the them to produce themselves. They flow through you.
For all that though, ‘La Forza del Destino’ is a disappointing release, or at the very least misleading. If only because I’d looked forward to ‘a Soylent Green album’ so much, the tracks re-packaged (without any re-editing) here have a hard time justifying their existence for anyone who’s heard it all the first time round. On Isolée’s ‘Western Store’ Jörn Elling Wuttke did significant re-editing work, and a number of the tracks like ‘Cité Grande Terre’ benefited from re-mastering. Not only that, but the collection as a whole provided a bridge between the two discrete soundworlds of ‘Rest’ and ‘We are Monster’. ‘La Forza del Destino’ meanwhile is a mere collection, so while each cut is essential and should prove deeply satisfying to fresh ears and those without access to the old vinyl EPs, to anyone who’s ‘heard it all before’ the release has a hard time justifying itself. Farben’s ‘Textar’ suffered similarly – for some inexplicable reason, gathering all Jelinek’s exquisite tracks together on one convenient CD detracted from each moment – the totality destroyed the project’s wholeness somehow. I can’t help but feeling the same thing has happened here. And yet, each track is brilliant.
トラックリストA Low (Part 1)
B1 After All
B2 Not To Be Named
C Jet Set
D1 On The Balcony
D2 Cold Showers
E1 La Forza Del Destino
E2 Stay Stupid
F1 Camera Obscura
F2 Humpty Acid