BILL – Glassbamboo
From BILL – Spielwiese Zwei
Released on Klangbad, 2010, Germany

It’s hard to quantify the importance of Jaki Liebezeit over contemporary electronic music or even over modern drumming but no one can deny the fact that his hypnotically regular and highly characteristic  drumming influenced – in one way or another – the sound of many modern productions.  The German prince of drumming sadly left us on 22 January 2017, while he was still highly prolific, multiplying the numbers of projects he took part in since the 2000’s.

Why musicians who kept on releasing music with a constant level of quality (and a very high one) should be doomed past the years 2010’s, and therefore should not keep up with the standards they had for decades ? Jaki Liebezeit‘s musical carreer invalidates such a pessimistic theory.

Far from the madding crowd, Krautrock legends – namely Jaki Liebezeit and Hans Joachim Irmler from Faust – teamed with flute player Clive Bell and To Rococo Rot‘s Robert Lippok for a one-off project called BILL in 2010. The result, released on Irmler‘s label Klangbad, is a superb Krautrock album which fully takes advantage of the latest technologic progress in the field of recording technics.

The opening track, Glassbamboo – whose name is not the only thing which reminds of Sakamoto‘s Plastic Bamboo – is a great dubby tune with a bit of an eastern feel (that’s due to the flute, of course), that is superbly produced. It is without doubt the work of musicians who spent ages in studio and who know many of its subtleties, as the mixing of each instrument sounds close to perfect to our ears.

We highly recommend this great album to Liebezeit‘s fans as it also features an 8 minute-long jam which showcases the hypnotic drumming of Can‘s former drummer, The Thrower.