38 minutes, 38 seconds

Der Blutharsch
Der Blutharsch

Albin Julius has always struck me as the neofolk movement's answer to Moby. Moby's innovation was to raid the Alan Lomax library of original American roots music (folk, country, gospel, blues) of the '20s, '30s, and '40s and weave it into his electronic tapestry of beats and synths and all manner of studio trickery. In the best tradition of a lot of techno DJs, the songs were more about the creator's record collection than about original composition. They were testaments to the power of pastiche. The supremacy of sampling. The conquest of collage. OK, I'll stop now.

In Der Blutharsch's case, Julius's frame of reference is obscure European classical and popular recordings of the '20s, '30s, and '40s. But the technique is similar, if a good deal less polished than Moby's hit-making approach. These old recordings form the basis--if not the entirety--of a lot of Julius's songs, making them not so much compositions as montages. But as with Moby, the source material is often so obscure that it sounds original. After all, this isn't like Vanilla Ice sampling the bass line from "Under Pressure."

In any case, Julius (who began to experiment with this approach in his previous band, The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath a Cloud) brought something new to the neofolk genre, something that hasn't been successfully imitated, though many have seemed to be trying. Lately he seems to be moving away from this method of making music, favoring more varied (and more "organic") instrumentation and a more song-like approach. But the early Der Blutharsch recordings on this album have an exhilarating lo-fi experimentalism to them, as if Julius knew that he had discovered something interesting but hadn't quite figured out what to do with it yet.

Also today:

38:38 Les Joyaux de la Princesse, Aux Petits Enfants de France
38:38 Skinny Puppy, Too Dark Park
38:37 The Sundays, Reading, Writing and Arithmetic
38:35 Placebo Effect, Manipulated Mind Control
38:34 Dive, True Lies
38:33 Kriegsfall-U, Kriegsfall-U
38:30 Accessory, Deadline
38:27 Necro Facility, The Room
New arrival! 57:58 HexRx, X
New arrival! 53:27 Liar's Rosebush, Circle the Squares
38:23 Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd, After the Night Falls
38:21 Various artists, Scontrum, Act II
38:15 Garmarna, Garmarna