P·A·L – Signum

It seems to me that this album is an underrated gem. There are multiple levels to this. First, it is a great concept album. The tracks are themed around human suffering, existential absurdity, political and economic madness with a focus on historical documents from the defunct GDR/DDR (Eastern , German Democratic Republic). This political/historical referencing is somewhat reminiscent of Laibach; however, PAL sounds very different from Laibach, mainly due to the album´s unique kind of digital-sounding synthesizer purism. The synthesizer sound is really quite particular, digitally clean and clear and yet, almost inexplicably, somehow at the same time warm and rough and very powerful. This alone would make the album worth listening to. Furthermore, the construction of the tracks is intricate and innovative, kind of fragmented and reconstructed in an intelligent way, without neglecting a subtle evolution of the sounds by modulation. The tracks thus appear to be static and evolving at the same time. A similar kind of paradoxical balance appears in the style of the music. On one hand, it could be described as slightly EBM-tinged industrial (with affinities to Esplendor Geometrico) due to its harshness, on the other hand, there are aspects of modern Techno/IDM to it, due to the subtlety of sonic modulation, shimmering strings and drums/beat structure, sometimes even exhibiting a certain dry and mechanic electroid funkiness reminiscent a bit of a kind of Carl Finlow with refreshingly less of a trance factor. And, last not least, in spite of the painful seriousness of the themes of the album, I find it also subtly resonating with some existential joy and humour which seems to transcend all the pain without annihilating any of it. That the album manages to balance all these opposites in one finely tuned sound structure makes it, for me, a great and deeply human work of art.

Bewegung is a cover of a composition with the same name by Telepherique.