KRAMM

EN

Most of you will know the name if I put Bruno in front of it. Indeed, Bruno Kramm occasionally colors outside the box, and that has now resulted in the album “Die Schöpfung und Meer Kurzgeschichten”. This album actually consists of three chapters if you like: there is “Die Schöpfung,” which is actually only one song, “Seven Nightmares From A Random Forest,” good for 7 songs, and “Eight Oscillations From The Latent Space,” good for, right, 8 tracks.

Don't compare this with old or new Das Ich stuff because Kramm does something completely different on his own here. Here, he puts short stories onto a soundtrack. Let me start with "Seven Nightmares From A Random Forest," short stories written by Bruno Kramm when he was still active as a Zillo (once a popular German wave/gothic magazine) writer and was inspired by authors such as Lovecraft, Orwell, and Stanislaw Lem to focus on his own imaginative, dystopian worldview. Musically, these stories are supported by a cutting modular cacophony and synthetic sound carpets that accentuate the atmosphere of each song. So don't expect "musical" songs, but rather dark, menacing short stories, modern dark fairy tales for a doomed generation, so to speak.

And that is also the case for “Seven Nightmares From A Random Forest,” although the history of these stories is slightly more recent. They were written when Bruno Kramm himself, forced into fever dreams by the Covid virus, wanted to do something creative during the corona pandemic. Here, the sounds and music are much more haunting, the atmosphere is a little more menacing, while “Eight Oscillations From The Latent Space” allows for even more fascination for an only fantasized sci-fi future. The pandemic made Bruno Kramm think, in a fairytale-like way, about his fascination for death and decay, for disaster and madness, but also for magic. Wonder and a lot of words and sounds are given that, as it were, suck you into the music and the words. You dream the images yourself.

The lyrics, which are reminiscent of the gothic horror stories from the classic novels, are in English, except for that one song “Die Schöpfung,” in which a machine recognizes man as its creator and is somewhat similar to the themes used by Das Ich on the album “Antichrist”. Kramm, who once started solo in an attempt to be poppy next to Das Ich (remember the album “Coeur” (Synthetic Symphony 2001), has now found much more depth. In fact, this “Die Schöpfung und Meer Kurzgeschichten” is a kind of audiobook, much more than a music album. A gothic audiobook that is, with 16 beautiful (sic) fairy tales.

Kurt INGELS
25/01/2024

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NL

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Kurt INGELS
25/01/2024

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