Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cicadidae, December 9, 2005
I first heard this album when I was living in Barcelona. My time in Spain was not the holiday fun that you or I might imagine. I was broke, sad, and working for a few bucks an hour at a restaurant full of crazy people. My musical creativity had come to a grinding halt with no money to fix broken equipment and no time to make music after the long hours at work. Luckily, my roommate ran a record label so my apartment was piled high with new and interesting music. Kammerflimmer Kollektief's album Cicadidae bubbled to the surface in the sea of CDs and somehow captured the harsh beauty that my life was at that point.
Shimmering and elusive, each track is a brilliantly orchestrated little story of brass, strings and percussion with grinding, crackly, computer-programmed noise and beats all melded together to form a seamless organic entity. Electronic elements woven together with instrumental improvisation, or is it the other way around? It's the kind of music that makes my heart feel tangy beauty and longing captured in pristine simplicity, yet it has the noise and imperfections of the real world. Meditative music for our harsh world. A soundtrack of inspiration for a society gone mad.
No matter how crazy life seemed to get, I could listen to this album and things somehow seemed, I don't know, not better, but it was okay that things weren't okay. Like the natural ebb and flow of confusion and inspiration made sense.
Based in southern Germany, the six-person Kollektief describes itself as a collective expression by musicians communicating with each other in the spaces between control and loss of control, intuition and reflection, density and transparency. Cicadidae is their third release on the brilliant Berlin-based label Staubgold ([...]).
Now that I am back in Canada with a life that is a little more stable, I listen to this very same album and it is different. I hear new stories, sounds I didn't hear before. Is it possible to be objective? Is it possible to separate our senses from the mental / emotional / spiritual space that we are in? Is this a music review, or my personal experience of someone else's personal expression? ? Andrew Wedman
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Nice, thoughtful music, January 25, 2006
Sometimes adding the right amount of melodic, accessible material to the right amount of discordance results in something that is both interesting and music - that's the case here. Experimental, off-kilter elements, at certain moments quite discordant, with added static and little background noises throughout, never quite drown out underlying wistful melodies, adding up to a thoughtful, reflective listen. It comes across as mellow, at times almost sentimental, without becoming muzak, and at the same time disruptive without becoming noise. Reminiscent of a more laid back Tortoise in places.
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by Kammerflimmer Kollektief 
