Gehen, by Swod

I am absolutely a sucker for the use or incorporation of piano in music, particularly in a neoclassical style, so my recent discovery is an exciting one. Combine a mist of static and electronic sound, sleepy droplets of various acoustic instruments, and a few snippets of foreign speech forming helixes around a ribbon of piano phrases, and you have Swod, the recording project of multi-capable musicians Oliver Doerell and Stephan Wohrmann from Berlin. And God knows, God help me with it too, I love me some of those muziky Germans.

Swod's first album, Gehen, which in English means "go," begins with a one minute waltz of rhythmic electronic scraping and a mildly urgent piano awakening. This soft, frantic piano surrounded by eerie static and cymbal is essentially the voice that carries through the entire album, but it never grows monotonous. The album's namesake track incorporates a bass guitar line behind fluttering chords, with the sound of Oliver's fingers sliding and moving on the strings clear and close. With Fugitif 2, they play with the wavering and decaying effect of the sustained note on the piano, fleshing it out with a bit of electronic percussion and faint speech, or some of what sounds like just ordinary background sound and ambience in the studio. Minimal as their music is, it never feels thin because of these intricacies.

Tucholskystr. 34, one of my favorite tracks on the album, begins with almost a full minute of ominous electronic shuffles before it pours into a strong, mournful, classically-inspired piano piece. Surprisingly, the two streams of sound complement each other. Hochbahn is another favorite of mine, and well-placed in the track-listing as well, as it relieves the listener of a bit of the melancholy without disrupting the pace. There are noises like chirping and buzzing that are deceptively organic, so at first listen it seems as though the environment that the music creates has finally opened up, but then you realize that it's only clever electronic engineering and you're still in the same extremely intimate space, holding your breath. The final track, Walz 57, is an effective return from the comparative lightness of Hochbahn and a fitting end. It cycles fervently through its two central sounds; as the track progresses you seem to be traveling toward and then away from the piano, with the electronic surrounding an acoustic climax.

This gets the nod. Look into it.