B. Fleischmann's
Music for Shared Rooms contains reworked versions of compositions he originally wrote for theatrical performances and films over the course of a dozen years. Returning to entirely instrumental material following more song-driven albums like
Stop Making Fans,
Shared Rooms is one of
Fleischmann's more diverse efforts, mixing melancholic post-rock scenes with beat-heavy workouts. "Brenne" seems to reframe the yearning chords of earlier track "Composure" into a restless IDM track, with jittery beats crowding the flickering melodies. "Taxi Driver" is a piece of ominous, brooding trip-hop, while the autumnal "Entwurf einer Ballade" sets sparse, stirring pianos to crackling boom bap. "Shock" is filled with erratic industrial pulsing, preceding "Fluechtlingswalzer," which builds from soft oompah horns into a tense electronic march surrounded by a whirlwind of scattered German voices. "In die Disko" sports an unhinged schaffel beat, and several other tracks continue in this sort of sideways techno vein. "Take the Red Pill" smears starry synth whooshes over a slimmed-down thump, and "Ashley Smith" has shimmering oscillations set to an even more minimalist beat. All of the tension seems to have been released by the album's final tracks, including the relaxed pipe organs and chimes of "Zweites Vierteljahr" and the murky ambience of "Die Erde ist mir fremd geworden." For a sprawling 70-minute release drawn from an archive of pieces written for several different contexts, covering an array of different styles,
Music for Shared Rooms is a set of focused experiments rather than a scattered mess, and plays like its own standalone feature. ~ Paul Simpson
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