This is an album designed to affect and unnerve you. This album will creep up on you, softly, slowly and gently. Before you know it, you will be caught up in its drift, Sachs onus having soaked its way into your head.
It is a minimal set that makes the most of every colour in its sonic palette. It is not, in other words, an immediate album. This again works in its favour. You will think that you heard something, maybe a faint scream, a switch or even a click that has leapt out and clipped the tastebuds of your sonic palette. And, not being quite sure, you will return to the album afresh and hear something quite brand new. And then you’ll hear of something else quite brand new…
One is on tenterhooks throughout this whole album – a sudden burst of electronica, a violently scraped string section – all the usual suspects are here. By this, I mean violins and cellos bringing sadness and relief alternately and an all-too-familiar sense of Joy Division-esque doom and gloom and dread. All are deployed with Hitchockian precision.
You’ll want to be scared. You won’t know when things are happening. Like all the best thrillers and horror movies, it’s icy silence one minute and then all-out violent bloody sonic mayhem the next. Before one has a chance to fight back, the attacker recedes back into the ether, leaving one aurally wounded, but, somehow, strangely excited also.
The only other artist out there doing exciting sonic things like this at the moment is Four Tet. New Gestalt, as presented by the sounds here on Inside The Rain Chamber, certainly has Four Tet’s fondness for electronic blips, beeps, squeaks and whistles. However, while Four Tet is more interested in disappearing into soulless techno exploration, Neu Gestalt is canny enough to know when to step back. He lets his soundscapes swoop, soar, breathe and absorb us.
It is the kind of music which paints pictures in your head as you listen to it. Memories past or present will drift across the insides of your eyelids as the whole sound slowly swallows you. There may well be no lyrics or samples but there is a real, rock-hard soul at the very centre of Inside The Rain Chamber.