Klappkart #1 – Rrill Bell

Opening Theme
This is the story of Blade, a fine-crafted handsaw,
former soldier of fortune in the timber wars,
who renounced mercenary extraction for The Man,
before retiring to the solitude of a shack on the plains.
This is the story of Blade’s return to the forest where he gave up cutting, to sing a song of regret and seek redemption.

I. The Return
The trek in is a ravine fever dream
of dilated time and lurking flashbacks…

II. Lament
And here at last was the clearing,
resplendent in the dusk, sweet darkness falling.
All night Blade sat and sang, he wailed, his voice doubled, tripled.
He rosined his bow with the sap of the vanquished,
and asked that his wrongs might be righted.

III. Atonement
And lo
as the witching hour approached
the forest folk, assorted flora,
emerged to warmly greet him,
then whispering, withdrawing,
they held council.
Soon the flickering drone of forgiveness
filled the hazy glade.

IV. Release
Past transgressions laid to rest,
a twitching, pulsing grew in presence,
till all around erupted
into joyful, mossy-padded raving.

Blade’s Return was conceived and primarily recorded during a two-week residency (sponsored by the SHAPE platform for emerging artists) in the woods of Saxon Switzerland, on the Czech/German border, in the summer of 2020.

Technically, the piece primarily consists of layered recordings of ad hoc tape/dictaphone installations made in the national park near Stadt Wehlen in southeastern Germany. Subtle, highly developed spatial recording and re-amping techniques, combined with meticulous assembly, editing and layering in post-production, yield surreal soundscapes of great depth and detail.

Musically, the hybrid piece plays with a range of inspirations and associations, from the lo-fi guitar-to-cassette-four-track music of Ash Bowie and Emil Amos to Rolf Julius‘ outdoor interventions and beyond. Unabashedly „cinema for the ears“, Blade’s Return is equally inspired by the worlds of film and animation, from the classic Czech cartoon series Krtek (The Mole) to the psychedelic quest films and new westerns of the 1960s and ’70s to works like Fischli & Weiss‘ Der Rechte Weg.

Born and raised in the US-American Rust Belt, and a resident of Germany for over two decades, Rrill Bell draws on the formative inspirations of radical scratch culture, Cagean thought, harmolodics, musique concréte, and various other strains of experimental music practice. Over the past decade, his work has also expanded to include various hybrid approaches to location recording, augmented reality, composition and audio narrative.

Klappkart is a new Berlin-based label that intends to release digital audio works from artists of various fields who share an exploratory approach to listening, soundmaking and storytelling. Each digital release is published in combination with a poster/booklet print edition. Klappkart #1, Blade’s Return, is available as a beautiful two-color riso-print booklet featuring narrative texts from the piece and accompanied by a download code, or as a stand-alone digital download here on Bandcamp.

Rrill Bell’s work has previously been released by the Elevator Bath, Gertrude Tapes, Weird Forest and Denovali labels, among others.

rrill-bell.bandcamp.com
soundcloud.com/rrill-bell
www.youtube.com/user/jimpermanent
the-preterite.com