Back when Prefuse was still Reichin‚ doing
tasteful tuned percussionism as Delarosa & Asora — he
being D&A when post-rock was DOA, corpse defiled by
the bashful boys gazin' at their kicks and too scared
to sing a lick — Oliver Braun was painting the town a
wicked shade of brown. His Beige broke off a
(not-so-)seriously-funky sound that took the
thunk-and-lurch of hip-hop über-producers and took to
it with scissors, cut-cut-cutting bass and beats into
spastic dance-anthems that few DJs'd ever play, all
that twitching making them itch. Those who don't
break out in spots when exposed to irregular rhythms
and truncated tones'll find Braun's gear like one big
spastickated party; and three years after the
brightly-coloured Beige barney Ein Königreich Für Eine
Handgranate, he returns with his third big shindig,
debuting as Braun on a smartly-titled set punctuated
by a jumped-up cut where a sassy soul-diva exhorts
that "nothing has changed!" Change is a constant
in nomenclature only, as Braun butters up a cut-up
jam — actually called "Explosions in B.E.I.G.E. (Nothing
Has Changed...)" — that seems keen to keep things the
same. Such jive jammery, as is the Beige way, is
sliced and diced into a tossed salad tossed with
autoerotic fervor, the resulting strokings so
staggeringly staggered that they can make you feel
drunk just listening to it. Any attempts to dance with
limbs other than your hands leave one with guilty
feet and a feeling of arrhythmia. Stitching varying
vocalists to his jabbing and stabbing take on
micro-edited funk, Braun proves himself the exuberant
studio monkey, "Da Flash an da F***! (Dort Oben
Leuchten Die Sterne)" tossing a saucy Spanish vocal
singing of "el funk" into a stop-stop-stop
start-it-all-over-again party mix whose mixed bag
lolls through the deflating whimpers of a flaccid
balloon, a solemn Sideshow Mel slide-whistle, and
blaring horns hocked from a more celebratory record.
Such brassiness comes back with "Hihi! (...Genau Das
Machts Ja So Bitter)," but this time he has Dennis
Kessler breathing into an actual trumpet, riffing on a
riff that's completely out of meter with the shards of
fragmented rhythm that Braun shatters underneath —
a jazz-like moment on a record that drops/namedrops
the funk/"the funk" as much as any Parliament jam.
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