DIt is well known that we underestimate the quiet sounds, ignore them and ignore them, even or especially in concerts. The little silence, the tapping and whispering and clattering and humming is not empty, in everyone piano There is something private, something seditious – just what, you can't choose beforehand. It comes over you when you're listening, just as it comes over you when you're silent with someone. So, just to be on the safe side, we often fill it with our own whispers and murmurs.
At Meute's concerts, the silence has a sound, the quiet tones have the most important part. They are the vanguard, the announcement of ecstasy, the anticipation of the party with pounding bass. There are countless emotions in them, private and rebellious, but also communal, the pack's own, and that's why the fans freeze when they hear them, the near silence, willingly kneel down, only to then jump up when it gets loud again, to celebrate them. They live up to the name of this band, because then they are the pack, they are the crescendo and decrescendo and the surging, the physical rise and fall of the music.
On the roofs of world-famous concert halls
They have been around for almost nine years: eleven men in red uniforms, sometimes with a double line-up, who play wind instruments and drums. Sounds like yesterday, but is somehow still from tomorrow, because they create techno from real instruments, breaking tracks down into individual parts and reassembling them acoustically with trumpets, trombones, snare drums, marimba, tuba and so on. The founder Thomas Burhorn and Hans-Christian Stephan, both trumpeters, take care of the arrangements. And it doesn't get boring while listening and watching, also because, if the place allows it, they make the audience part of their performance, which was noticeably easier in the past, when they were still a marching band on the streets and squares of Europe the fame of today in opera halls and on the roofs of world-famous concert halls or at the largest festivals in the world. But still, it always works surprisingly well, like recently in the decidedly aloof Frankfurt Jahrhunderthalle.
They have been on the “Empor” tour since the end of February. Even before the pandemic there were 100 gigs a year. Two albums later there are more, it started in Poland, in March it was Germany's turn, now they're flying to America, Los Angeles and San Francisco are coming in April. From June onwards the festivals. October in Portugal and Spain, then back home.
“Empor” is the name of the album that was released a few weeks ago and temporarily reached number seven in the German charts, which is unusual for the genre. It contains, among other things, a track that was created for the new season of the series “Babylon Berlin”, “Hypnose”. So there is actually a techno troupe disguised as an orchestra playing at a dance marathon in Berlin in the 1920s, a greeting from the future, and really exhausting themselves in the process.
So what could Meute's triumph through listening habits, concert halls and musical cultures tell us about the overall state of the genre? In Berlin, techno has just been declared an intangible UNESCO cultural heritage. And in interviews, label managers now openly say that hip-hop history has been told, and instead they are now relying on the newly awakened techno.
Bands like Etna and artists like Solomun have achieved the status of classics of the genre in recent years. Meute has been working with them for a long time, and new duos, DJs and colorful characters are constantly joining them. The role of the band is that of translators. Her fans have never been just nightlife fans. Anyone who went to one of their concerts a few years ago saw more jazz players than ravers, more admirers of the precision with which they tuned their instruments than ecstatic dancers. And yet, with their sophisticated musical arrangements, stars such as Flume, Stephan Bodzin, Deadmau5 and Laurent Garnier, who influenced the genre in the early new millennium together with Daft Punk from France, have brought awareness to those who had previously been influenced by the traditions of electronic music knew little. They have charged their tracks with silence and power, as if they were designed for exactly that purpose.
Fittingly, a new arrangement of the Toto Chiavetta song “Anti Loudness” has landed on “Empor”. But also a new interpretation of the deep house track “Loss Of Hope”, which introduces the complexities of their compositions in a sparkling and typical pack way. This means, for example, that everything always looks light as a feather and free-flowing, without any pressure to take a breath, and that the wind instruments are never over-represented, never take over the action, but rather satisfy the ebb and flow of expectations of their listeners, sometimes subvert them, and then join them again to surprise with some powerful sound image. “LoCKeDoWN2” is also beautiful and ambiguous and a tribute to the brass section and fits into the tradition of Meute's favorite songs without drummer ecstasies on the album.
But back to the concert, because theory doesn't support a party. It is part of the great staging spectacle of these eleven men that at least once every evening they disappear into the crowd with their cameras, form a compact group somewhere not far from the stage and from there broadcast their dance music to the fans. And for everyone who doesn't stand right there, there is, in fairness, a transfer of this musical depth to the screen. From where it's not far away from the next techno festival. So summer can come.
Meute’s album “Empor” (Tumult) is available for 20 euros.
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