Bruno Schmidt’s New Label ‘Assemblies Of God’ Releases Genre-bending Record by Baüzer Vep
This First Release Takes You On A Bad Trip In The Best Possible Way
Baüzer Vep - The Gurner
Pablo Arrangoiz, a man of many monikers, has quite a few experimental releases as well as some dance floor treasures under his belt. His work navigates unholy experimental sounds, spooky atmospheric endeavors, clownish takes on Bach’s canons and much more. The Gurner, released under his new alias Baüzer Vep, fits the bill perfectly: it induces you in a dream-like, slightly nightmarish state, but does so with irony and without neglecting grooves.
It’s just a perfect fit for the first release of Bruno Schmidt’s new sublabel, Assemblies Of God. Kicking off with such a free-of-boundaries artist is certainly a bold take by Schmidt, and rightly sets the tone for a label that not only operates outside of dancefloor-oriented schemes, but is not bound to electronic music genres and proven formulas in a wider sense.
And it’s evident from the get-go: the electro beat of "Vu-Vu-Be-Zon" switches from one layer of melody to another, mingles with unintelligible French vocals, then suddenly stops. It’s the perfect opener to this LP, able to keep you on your toes by mixing danceable rhythms with a sound palette that’s mysterious as well as captivating.
Baüzer Vep plays all the electronic instruments, but also arranges hypnotic guitar arpeggios in Spaghetti, and presents you with a noir saxophone melody in Ode 2 Tietchens. The Warm Broth of the last track of side A must be some sort of toxic, acidic chemical waste, judging by the shrieks that conclude the first half of the LP over some delightful doom riffs.
”In this record each track devours the other, each piece chooses its own tempo, its own rhythm, feeling like a robot new wave band, experimented upon on each song with different inputs and data.”
At the beginning of side B we find ourselves once again lost in electro beats and mysterious echoes that suspiciously invite us to dance. Can we trust those latin percussions and bizarre screams? Maybe not, but it’s also hard to resist them. The title track is zombie post-punk, coming back from the grave in a skeletal undead form to haunt us. But with bells!
Wawawa again takes a page from the synth-punk book, with an unrelenting rhythm, chewy melodies, and some vocals from far away. The album, as almost each one of its nine tracks, won’t let you enjoy the commodity to prepare for the end of the track, to prepare for what comes next: it ends abruptly.
All in all, Arrangoiz manages once again to accomplish a hard task; which is to produce a kaleidoscopic album while also maintaining a recognizable style and approach. If this is the standard that Assemblies Of God wants us to get used to, we’re in for some good treats.
Written by Alessandro Cebrian Cobos
Artist Pablo Arrangoiz and label leader Bruno Schmidt
