poemproducer / brainwashed review

AGF <Language Is The Most>

Quecksilber

With her previous full-lengths, Head Slash Bauch and Westernization Completed, Antye Greie proved entirely capable of creating beautiful and unique electronic music without the help of her Laub bandmate Von Jotka or frequent collaborator Vladislav Delay. Reaching an early peak on last year's Westernization, AGF's mature style is both more challenging than her past work and more rewarding. The increasingly abstract free-association of Greie's characteristic speak-singing seems to have found perfect accompaniment in a new loosening of song structure which, instead of dissolving substance, allows for the careful buttressing of her words with basic and uncluttered sound-forms, accentuating the language and aligning the music more closely with the power of suggestion. The "instrumental" portion of AGF's music remains a recognizably laptop-based affair, full of crisp, bass-less beats, clean synth-like melodic lines, and a delicate underpinning of digital drone and flutter; however on Westernization and to a greater degree on Language is the Most, these elements are treated with greater economy of use, layered less frequently or abundantly, and approached with more attention to variety and improvisational flow. It's as if Greie treats instrumental sound like it were part of her vocal, as if these melodic shards and open rhythms have assumed fixed places in the artist's advancing word bank, lent the same concise, charged delivery as her speech. This effect is consistent with the broader theme of Language is the Most, essentially a live recording from AGF's performance at the Ars Electronica Festival's Klangpark in 2003. The theme of the festival last year was "Code - The Language of Our Time," and it's hard to imagine an musician engaged in a more literal dialogue between digital code, musical composition, and spoken language than Antye Greie. Westernization is as much sound poetry as it is patient left-field electronica, and Language makes the distinction even more complicated. The live setup, by force or by choice, has Greie's voice appearing with less regularity and less reliance on structural cues, creating music whose success is largely reliant on the tact of the artist's speech and the resonance of her words taken alone. Her compositions progress along a stream-of-consciousness logic, incorporating numerous field recordings, samples and organic-sounding clatter to make Language AGF's most complex listen to date, despite the equally unprecedented amount of open space appearing throughout. Compounding the event's thematic interest in coded language, text, and the relevancy of established communication methods, Greie incorporates pieces of Westernization, as good a document of the artist's own "language" as any, into her live set. This decision has ended up granting Language something of a "companion piece"-status, and while I'd be more likely to recommend the former to new listeners, the live disc has provided an equal amount of rapturous listening and contains the seeds of new refinement in AGF's sound, making it just as essential. - Andrew Culler