Roland Bühlmann: Crucial

Remember being a child and making noise by blowing through a blade of grass? Roland Bühlmann certainly does. It’s just one of many unusual sounds on Crucial, a solo effort with his electric guitar and electric bass joined by a staggering array of sonic tools. Bühlmann records several tracks of guitar and bass before layering that with other, more obscure varieties of stringed instruments, like the hanottere, a Swiss zither, the guitar-ukulele hybrid known as a guitalele, the mandola, tuned a fifth lower than a mandolin, and a modern recreation of a kinnor, an ancient Israelite type of lyre. On various tracks, he also employs the Aeon sustainer, an infinite sustain device for guitar, along with grasses, wine glasses, a whistle, and another ancient Israeli instrument, the shofar, usually a ram’s horn and heard most often in the modern period at the start of the Jewish New Year. Adding to that wild brew, Bühlmann sprinkles sounds from various objects he uses as percussion, including branches and leaves, knives, an oil tank, stones, wrenches, and on one track, an udu, a Nigerian drum made from pottery. In typical critical shorthand, reviewers often reference music the reader is likely to have heard as a comparison to the recording under discussion, but aside from a few passages in Kaiilen and Buzzing, where the primitive percussion made me think of the Residents, Bühlmann’s swirling soundscapes don’t sound much like anything else unless you’ve heard his two previous solo releases, Aineo (2015) and Bailenas (2017). Most interesting to this listener, as he slips and slides along with the twists and turns in Bühlmann’s eccentric structures, is the way that Bühlmann manages to preserve the serendipitous accidents of improvised music while working with the painstaking process of overdubbing so many layers. Crucial is an endlessly fascinating release that’s especially suited to headphone listening for an hour of music to get happily lost with.
Self-produced; Roland Bühlmann (el g, bass g, Aeon Sustainer [1,2,4,8], grasses [3,6], guitalele [1,4], hanottere [1], kinnor [1,6,7], mandola [5], shofar [4], whistle [3], vcl [7], wine glasses [1,8]; percussion: branches, knives, leaves, oil tank, stones, udu [6], wrenches); Switzerland, no dates specified; 1.Kaiilen/ 2.Higgayon/ 3.Buzzing/ 4.Arabon/ 5.Crucial/ 6.Uvkal/ 7.Miserere/ 8.Subconsciously; 61:19. rolandbuehlmann.bandcamp.com