Liedgut

Experimental electronic albums exploring tonality, ambience, and found sound crackle are not exactly new things in the world, but Atom TM's elegant presentation of Liedgut, fake high literature packaging and all, gives a good sense of what the album aims for. Liedgut ultimately feels like an attractive re-encapsulation of strong ideas — the dying robot voices on "Wellen und Felder II," nervous, stuttering atmospherics on "Uberleitung" and elsewhere, the general feeling of corroded and fractured compositions finding new contexts, down to the gentle radio broadcast fanfare of sorts on "Mittlere Composition, No. II." One of the cleverest and most haunting touches comes on "Interferenz," featuring the first fully steady rhythm on the album. Yet part of it is derived from the sound a cell phone makes when sending out a signal in proximity to a set of speakers, becoming a cleverly reworked example of the outside world's inescapability.