Even the cover doesn’t bode well. In a scene that could have come from Ridley Scott’s science fiction cult film “Blade Runner,” someone looks out of a dark, shattered diner with slumped shoulders. Opposite, behind the window, there are still a few scattered figures standing under the neon lights of a building that is less of a building and more of a pile of rubble in which a few lights are still burning on the ground floor.
No, the world that the Augsburg beat tinker Sebastian Birkl alias Dot sketches in his instrumental sci-fi saga “Tales From Erygow” (Anette Records) is no longer intact. Humanity has already successfully dismantled itself and the planet – which no longer seems so far-fetched in view of the climate change that has long since become noticeable.
And so the lyrically condensed images of the darkly rasping narrator reporting from Erygow (spoken by the French-Egyptian voice artist Doc Holiday) are repeatedly linked to the question of how it could have come to this. You hear about hotels overgrown with plants, houses that rise like shards into the sky, and soft, rainy ground that swallows everything away. But also about how hope once turned into indignation and indignation into resignation. “And resignation, it felt almost pleasant. Cleansed.” Resignation as a settlement of emotional turmoil. How apt, how sad.
The beauty of this elegantly produced concept record is that despite all the dystopian escalation, the moral finger is never raised. The damage has already been done. Rather, there is a feeling of melancholy that is ultimately much more alarming than any climate activist attack on the Mona Lisa could ever be.
Especially since Birkl also delivers his musical masterpiece here in conjunction with musicians such as trumpeter Matthias Lindermayr. With its effortless combination of jazzy smoothness, fiddly synth futurism and voluminous beats, the album delivers exactly the cinematic breadth that the film credit-style list of those involved on the cover promises.
In the Augsburg Haus Schöne Felder he is now presenting the “Tales From Erygow” in an audiovisual setting in which AI also plays a role. The best way to find out exactly which ones is on site.
Dot presents “Tales From Erygow”, Friday, February 2nd, 7 p.m., Haus Schöne Felder, Milchberg 15