Dusted Reviews Artist: Superpitcher Album: Today Label: Kompakt Review date: Aug. 29, 2005

Superpitcher, a.k.a. Aksel Schaufler, is Kompakt’s lost boy, the lonely figure wilting at the sidelines, the label’s arch melancholic. His own songs are bruised, blushing things in which loops quietly caress each other under the cover of night, the narcotic haze of Schaufler’s numbed, ‘luuded vocals wrapped in blankets of greyscale tonology. While many Kompakt artists take liberties with genres, hopping around like impatient children waiting under the Christmas tree, Schaufler’s mood stays true through the year – an emotional register that is slightly downcast, even at its most amorous.

Today, Schaufler’s first mix disc, hews closely to his own designs. People who (think they) know are calling that aesthetic microgoth, but Schaufler lacks the portentousness and performative clichés of the ‘Gothic’ continuum: if anything, he is an old school, chiaroscuro Romantic. When Today slips into ‘micro’ mode, Schaufler’s selections sound evacuated and hollowed-out as opposed to merely minimal; these songs are covered in vast stretches of cumulus texture, and the disc feels slightly oppressive, as though something unbecoming is hovering over the listener. Moving in an arc, through the resigned, shifting patterns of Lawrence’s “Spark” and the glassy, voided bell-tones of Matias Aguayo’s mix of Michael Mayer’s “Lovefood,” Today peaks two thirds in. Nathan Fake’s “Dinamo” is startling, its pinprick melody shifting through uncertain chord changes before being swept up in wraith-like screeds of siren sound, before the Wighnomy Bros’ “Wurz Und Blosse” pins an ectoplasmic radiance of air-vent gust to the floor with precision-drilled bass and a hi-hat that sounds like the ticking of some unfeasibly miniaturized timepiece. Today flies away on the gorgeously melancholy arms of Sebastian Tellier’s “La Ritournelle,” but the disc’s unmistakable air of collapsing romance coasts the air and clings to the bed-sheets like an uncertain lover.

By Jon Dale

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