German guitarist Olaf Rupp combines elements of traditional flamenco (rasgueados, arpeggios, picados) with the fractured cadences of Derek Bailey, fusing them together with a blast-furnace tone recalling John Lee Hooker's most blown-out extremes. And yet, despite decades of concerts and releases on FMP and Emanem, often with marquee-grabbing collaborators like John Zorn, Peter Brötzmann, Butch Morris, Paul Lovens and Lol Coxhill, Rupp's music is largely unknown outside of European free improvisational circles, and (until now) has never been presented on vinyl.
Over its four double LP sides, Fuzzy Logic sounds like a Guitar Solos-era Fred Frith musing on Jandek or Carlos Montoya essaying the music of Cecil Taylor, veering from unadorned yet forceful exclamations into torrents of austere, alien gestures packed with modal angst (a rarity in the capital-I Improvisation world), rewarding careful listening with previously unexplored microlandscapes of impossibly interlocked waveforms.
Regarding the album's unique sound, Rupp writes, "Echtzeitmusik-people" -- referring to the most strident non-idiomists of the Berlin improv scene -- "will once again nag at all those minor chords and the indie rock fans will shake their heads in vain looking for the beat. But unrootedness is also a power, a gift, a way."
Indeed, Fuzzy Logic is powerfully unrooted. But most strikingly, it tracks Rupp's autodidactic turn into the fraught world of effects pedals. These days, soldering-iron jockeys produce an absurd array of signal processing tools, from bit crushers to tone benders, lo-fi loopers to 24-bit digital arpeggiators, all designed ostensibly as creative tools but more often marketed towards lazy players plying YouTube gear demos rather than pushing their boxes past the limits.
Fuzzy Logic, rather, beelines to the tone-smearing outer limits of overdrive, eschewing the well-trodden paths of wail, feedback and sustain to produce a rainbow spray of strange overtones, self-oscillation, and whispered notes beyond the reach of human touch. Tracks like Hundsrück Forest throw the electronics into sharp relief, subtly blending frozen hisses into a larger grid of crackling overtones before bursting into insistent atonal repetition.
Powered by a small amp driven by an attenuator which allows maximum blow-out tone at low volumes (combined with a subtly-coaxed sound-stretcher and loop pedal), Rupp amplifies mercurial sonic details into liminal territories typically unexplored by players chained strictly to skin-on-strings. In tandem with the tech, Rupp's singular finger-charge remains. For Rupp, a cluster of fast-moving notes should be considered "one agglomerated sound in motion… using spectralistic fields of tones." Accordingly, every track is packed with motion and color.
In a way, Fuzzy Logic echoes Palilalia's previous forays into the exquisitely fried spectrum of electric guitar exemplified by some of Bill Orcutt's records, but more pointedly by Cyrus Pireh's jaw-dropping explorations of speed-runs skittering through grainy distortion. But unlike Pireh, and unlike anyone else you'll likely conjure up, Rupp's work (despite its virtuosity) taps a primal throb dripping with eldritch and unspeakable menace, that punches through the buttery intellect to throttle the brain stem -- particularly at top volume, which is exactly how you should bathe in Fuzzy Logic to fully experience its torrential majesty. — TOM CARTER
