Imagine, if you will, walking into a huge, empty room. The stillness of the place is only interrupted by your own footsteps echoing throughout the empty space. Every wall is the same, gray, flat, and soulless. You look up and there it is, a vibrant painting hanging by itself on the wall. There’s just you, the painting, and nothing else.
No, I haven’t just spent a weekend revisiting a Haight-Ashbury acid test of the sixties. I have been lying on the floor in my headphones just keeping myself to myself. It’s most definitely the best way to listen to the second album Deuxieme Bureau from Germany’s Jumpel.
Jumpel found life in 2005 when Jo Durbeck, formerly with Bones, began to write and record his own music. Some of that music found its way onto the screen and in 2006 Jo won the award for Best Film Score at the Film Festival of Valencia in Spain.
His debut album Samuel Jason Lies On The Beach (Hidden Shoal Recordings) appeared in 2007. Now we have the second, named after the French military intelligence unit up until Germany’s invasion of 1940, Deuxieme Bureau.
The soundscape is minimalistic, discreet, and yet also provocative, inspiring avenues of thought and imagery. It is meticulous, without losing freedom. It is surreal without losing a sense a purpose. It is sublime without drifting off course. It takes you to places that are buried in your mind but are rarely visited amid all the chaos of today’s life.
“Leaves” opens the door to the album itself. Hidden Shoal say in their publicity that the music of Jumpel is like, ‘perfectly fabricated ecosystems, each track is a luscious miniature environment complete with its own micro-climate and prismatic inhabitants.’
By the time “Leaves” gives way to “Consider The Kicker Knows It” you too have become one of those inhabitants, totally absorbed in the places and scenes that your mind is creating. Gentle soothing textures rise like thermals carrying your imagination away with them. You look up and see that work of art. The room becomes full again.
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