VON SPAR - GARZWEILER (MLP)

"2017, eleven years after the beginning of work on Garzweiler II (the controversial extension of the mining area) and three years after their celebrated "Streetlife" LP, Von Spar present their "Garzweiler" EP on Altin Village & Mine. On it are four tracks on which the hedonistic visionaries once again prove that their Cologne studio is the scene of a unique congregation of taste, technical proficiency, and aesthetic relevance. The conceptual authority displayed on "Garzweiler" attests to this. Even - or especially - in the lightest moments of the atmospherically dense 24 minutes running time, one is confronted with the eerie suspicion that we are witnessing something that we were never meant to see or hear. The architecture of the tracks, much like the left-alone houses of Garzweiler, is haunted by ghosts. These ghosts, however, are, despite an evident rootedness in a certain musical tradition, less marked as references to the past than on their previous two albums: Instead, the sound of "Garzweiler" subscribes to an almost extreme contemporaneity. The tracks' calm and clear textures are grounded by urgent, unspecific turbulences, that time and again break through as instances of a ghostly real." (label info)