Bernard Fleischmann - Welcome Tourist
Bernard Fleischmann's Welcome Tourist is a musical travelogue, filled with the strange noises and wondrous melodies of distant, foreign places. An electronic record filled with hints of real instruments and tiny patches of scattered noise and fractured notes, Welcome Tourist is Fleischmann's soothing and invigorating travel journal.
A lyrical post-rock brush has been applied to the groovebox bass; piano and guitar are added to the electronic beats, field recordings and noise elements. Burst of glitch, wrecked synth melodies and a bit of acoustic guitar swarm around an elegant piano melody through the course of "Pass By." "Grunt" adds a drum kit and wood block to the rhythm section while the breathe of a fuzzbox voice ghosts alongside the piano melody. Similar to the manner in which Four Tet brings traditional instrumentation to the IDM world (or, actually, it can be said that the shift is the other way round), Fleischmann crafts an instrumental rock album filled with the innocent naivety of Boards of Canada style electronics.
Well, a mostly instrumental record. The last two tracks -- "Le Desir" and "Sleep" -- are both marred by the inclusion of vocals. They fit the program of Fleischmann's intent -- "There's more to life than the every day's routine," sings Christof Kurzmann on "Le Desir, "Keep this in mind 'till life becomes your dream" -- but they don't quite match the sublime headspace generated by the preceding nine instrumental tracks. Fortunately, you can skip them and load up the second disc and lose yourself in the sprawling 46 minute "Take Your Time" which makes up the entirety of disc two. Essentially a radio play without words, "Take Your Time" is a complete journey replete with reoccurring motifs which play off each other as the piece builds, thickens, and drains away.
Bernard Fleischmann's new record, Welcome Tourist, begins with a spoken-word excerpt from Henry David Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience." The musical accompaniment to the political reminder is part winsome melody breaking free and part creaky machinery caught in an endless loop. It is as close to a mission statement as he gets with this record, a piece of pointed rhetoric in a nearly wordless environment. Fleischmann wants us to be free to join him, wants us to be free of the tyranny of economic utilization. There are two stages to being a tourist: knowing that you have the freedom to travel, and being invited to go somewhere else. Welcome Tourist is a record which is both a travelogue and an ode to mental freedom.
B. Fleischmann
Morr Music [2003]
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