Neo-classical music is a very slippery fish. Try to decide what the genre really is about – traditional sounds used to tell modern stories? Not really, that excludes a sense of innovation baked into the heart of most pieces adorned with the label. But the simple word innovative isn’t quite right either; listen and there is something distinctly nostalgic going on. Läuten der Seele’s most recent album is one of the purest examples of this tension – and rather inadvertently, the German folk singer’s output works so well because his embrace of contradiction is rooted at the core of his sound. Ertrunken is a masterclass in the power of musical dissonance, the word for a lack of established harmony, an ineffable sense that something just sounds off. Dissonance is to music what conflict is to literature – present at all moments, with how it builds, resolved and finally settles being the bones of any piece. It’s how music gets its balance, its direction of plot. And while weighted towards harshness, the masterful way that balance is struck in Ertrunken is simply magnetic. The beauty emerges here in the turbulence itself – it works because the album constantly keeps the listener guessing at what comes next, where the sounds are going and even why they’re going there. Only within a genre created to reject definition can an album exist that is precisely so worth a listen for its refusal to be simple.
