On Indigo by Jailhouse (Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen, Rüdiger Carl)
Painters Markus and Albert Oehlen are no strangers to the world of music. Albert, better known for his abstract canvases, has worked for years in the various incarnations of multitalent Mayo Thompson’s Red Crayola; brother Markus had a mid ’80s disco hit in Germany with his 12-inch “Beer Is Enough” and still plays in many combos. But like other former punk rockers who’ve taken their cues from a do-it-yourself aesthetic, over time they’ve professionalized their dilettantish discoveries, turning them into techniques of taste. With Jailhouse, the brothers Oehlen team up with Rüdiger Carl, a “real” musician who – immigrating from the analytic rigor of German free jazz to pop – came looking for trouble: while Carl imports favored sequences of Free Jazz noise and sound effects, hearing in pop tasteless but infectious melodies, the Oehlens question the cultural and historical codes imbedded in this material. What the trio cook up on Indigo out of standards by John Coltrane (“Giant Steps”), Pharoah Sanders (“Upper and Lower Egypt”), and George Gershwin (“Summertime”), as well as their own compositions, sounds like a noise-band production stripped of its academic crutches and infused with a thorough-going pop sensibility. Jailhouse marginalizes the familiar melodies of these and other tunes (Richard Rodgers’ “My Favorite Things”) in favor of the ornamental effects of Casiotone-like electronic organs and moog synthesizers. The art of Indigo consists of turning this pop effluvia into the main event without driving out its ornamental charm. The disk’s noise seems to emerge from an extinct world that, in its time, invested musically in all the signature trappings of pop futurity. Unlike “easy listening” in its voguish reincarnation, Jailhouse don’t trade on the exchange value of rare, sought-after quotations; they enchant instead through pure acoustic excess.