AUTOHAUs

"Schlecht Zum Chatten - Recorded Live at the Ramsgate Music Hall" (Album, 2023) !Recommended!

"First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is" was Donovan's snappy summary of the Buddhist teacher Qingyuan Weixin's text on the nature of reality and evolving perception. The upshot of which is that on our journey to enlightenment we start by seeing a mountain as a permanent fixture in nature. We progress to an appreciation that it is a process, a combination of elements in constant flux. In the final stage of understanding we are able to reconcile the transcendent with the perceived essence of our reality.

And so it is with the music of AUTOHAUs - an intense aural experience that leads the listener on a journey through evolving perception by the force of its mesmeric power.

Their three track, sixty-six minute album Schlecht Zum Chatten was recorded live at the Ramsgate Music Hall on 30th June, 2022. All of whose duration is essential to their transformative listening experience. The listener begins with an awareness of each instrument whose interweaving lines become a series of mantras. As the listener loses themself in each piece, the players create a slowly rotating cognitive kaleidoscope of sound and you become lost in a lysergic storm cloud of phasing and feedback. As the pieces continue, instruments have reconstituted themselves in quantum recombination. We hear each sound but in terms of a cogent transcendent whole.

Saudade begins with tribal beats creating a sonic space where motorik bass establishes a Bauhausian gothic dub. Sparse guitar lines stretch and turn back on themselves like a sonic Möbius strip. Swirling phaser-driven guitar textures resolve and lead the track to its conclusion.

Words Fail Me starts as feedback and insistent kicks introduce the piece. Tension and urgency are apparent as the pace becomes more insistent. Looping phased noises are coaxed from the guitars while a locomotive bass line pulls the track in its wake.

A propulsive bass announces the final track Seisker Fyr. Choral feedback detunes to form a nuclear warning as the bass hits a double note groove. Primitive electronic percussion reminiscent to a 1970s Cabaret Voltaire bursts through intermittently until the track breaks down in a gentle haze of feedback.

AUTOHAUs play live, improvised fractal music, layering fuzzed-out noise, electronic drones, motorik percussion and hypnotic bass lines, and Schlecht Zum Chatten is an intense listening experience and a spectacular sonic resolution of unstoppable forces and immovable objects. By producing long improvised spaced-out songs, they journey with the listener away from somewhere to elsewhere... and nowhere. A must for fans of Loop, Spacemen 3, The Cosmic Dead, Ash Ra Tempel and Neu! 8/10

Alan Strode (June 2023)

Watch Saudade on YouTube HERE