A Closer Listen
Here’s a curious sonic nugget from Estonia’s Hidden Harmony Recordings: a beat tape on wax from an established artist operating under a pseudonym. In light of this knowledge, we can’t call it an intriguing debut album; we just don’t know how many albums the artist has under their belt. Muddying the water, TEKAMOLO is a technique for recalling the word order of a German sentence. When applied to the music, it may refer to the ordering of memories or placement of samples, each aspect related to the nostalgia inherent in these grooves.
“How much void can a song endure while still remaining a song?” Tekamolo asks. These nine “dissembled songs” are meant to reflect loneliness, yearning for connection and completion. This does not, however, prevent them from being fun. A pleasant haze descends in the opening seconds of “Oh No,” and we are already guessing (though we are not supposed to guess); might this be Eric Hilton? The mood shifts upon hearing a fuller sample: “You can be broken, it doesn’t make you useless, oh no.” “Fail” muses on a broken relationship with narrator and Shakespearean chorus: “This song was made for you, but you never listen to it.”
While considering the minimum requirements for a song, one might also consider the effects of layering. Each track is an amalgamation of pre-existing tracks and TV episodes, pitch-shifted and pasted, imitating the manner in which the memory conflates events. When we view a photo album, we reconstruct stories, but the only reliable frames are those that we can see. Most tracks sport an obvious theme: “How might I survive in this gentle world?”, “Your love never failed me yet” ~ but rumination is a constant sub-theme. Vinyl crackle runs throughout like mist.
The very title is retro: best tunes for your answering machine. Prior to the advent of ringtones, those of a certain age and interest chose songs to accompany their messages: songs that could be changed at the press of a button, or perhaps two buttons: answering machine and cassette player. It is difficult to imagine any of these tunes as being the best for this purpose, although they recall the primary feature of such messages: each involved only a snippet of a song standing in for the whole. The person recording would add their own voice, a rudimentary remix. In the words of “Nothing,” “I’m thrilled to announce that nothing is going on with me.”
Tekamolo calls the album “An Audio Diary of a Lonely Soul.” Each snippet seems to have personal meaning for the artist: “Everything I touch, I break.” These may have been earworms for the artist, or in recovery terms, the self-deprecating repetitions of (literal) “old tapes.” Yet there is also a life-affirming tone to these sonic collages, which defang even the toughest sentences through a process of recontextualization. “This song would be your home,” a voice sings, pitched and re-pitched, atop bright choirs. The music wants to draw one in, like the radio in Helen Reddy’s “Angie Baby.”
The question of how much a song can be deconstructed while still remaining a song may not have been answered, but perhaps the point is that a fraction is all one needs. (Richard Allen)
Thu Apr 10 00:01:53 GMT 2025