#pancrace

Their third vinyl release, Erinnerungen An Gesichter (“Memories of Faces”), is another mesmerizing gush of breathy drone laced with fragile melodies. Most pieces contain a chorus of blown reeds or brass mouthpieces, bowed strings, and pressed keys, or recordings of either one of these things, altered and looped. Schoppik plays most of the instruments, pitching its vibrations through a pedal rig to loop it, shaping the contours of trailing tones for a haunting effect. It’s as if he tries to wriggle out the vague folk melodies that were plucked from the small rotating cylinders of the first music boxes, the 18th century ones made by Genevan watchmakers. Much like these sound makers, Brannten Schnüre’s music embalms as it creates, generating something which is spirited yet appears as a distant spectacle. Rich mainly sticks to vocals, selectively embellishing or counteracting a soft melodic component in Schoppik’s music, or taking the lead, lending to the duo’s more song-like pieces, building a small, concise framework which Schoppik follows and hugs like a vine to a trellis.

Their sparser and sharper, transparent vignettes sometimes resemble the free creations of Fontaine and Areski, especially when Schoppik sings with Rich, while their long-winded dips touch on the vaguely atonal, combinational tones of Nico’s Desertshore. The duo’s past vinyl releases, Sommer Im Pfirsichhain and Muschelsammlung, are intricate creations in their own right, but at times they falter in transition from piece to piece. Erinnerungen An Gesichter resonates on its own terms with brief and sudden transportive moments, offering just as many contrastive moments as either of their last LPs.