A lot of musicians fall in love with their effect pedals, but Ulrich Troyer is probably the first one to describe the interior world of his stompboxes & delay pedals with a project that combines music, a graphic novel and hand drawn visuals for the live performance. SONGS FOR WILLIAM 2 is the second part of an experimental dub trilogy that started in 2011 on Mala's DEEP MEDI Label. The project is the perfect intersection of the talents and interests of Ulrich Troyer: illustration, architecture, acoustic research, old school dub and afrobeat.
Troyer - a trained architect - creates a distinctive and overall impressive soundarchitecture throughout the whole album full of dub references and abstract electronics that refer to Troyer's past as a MEGO artist. Comic novel and music are connected to each other and form a fascinating gesamtkunstwerk. Classic dub effects act as lead characters not only in the graphic novel but also in the music. They have names such as Muff, Herb, Memory Man and of course William the stompbox, the central character of the whole trilogy. They all form the grounding for a musical Dub-Story of comic and sound and at the same time open up a space of references to King Tubby, Kraftwerk or Augustus Pablo's Digital Productions.
The exclusive use of analog synthesizers and effects and the adaptation of the computer as a tapemachine constitute a deliberate limitation of possibilities and refer to methods of early nineties techno production techniques. With a lot of love for details and the bass as a fundament Troyer skillfuly assembles the whole range of dubtechniques only to push them a step further into the 21st century.
The opener SHAKE YOUR KNOBS combines deconstructed harmonica lines with a massive subbbass. Fascinating how glockenspiel, melodica and spring reverb in track nr. 3 SUMMER REVERB wander through spring reverbs and ringmodulators. DEADLOCK demonstrates the art of radical reduction: a massive bass line, statically resting in a deep echochamber, creates an enormous hypnotic slipstream.
With SONGS FOR WILLIAM 2 Troyer tightens his artistic and musical vocabulary and his sonic singularity. Pathbreaking the closing piece of the album: LANDSCAPES - a wonderful, abstract soundscape of 12 minutes length consisting of hissing, crackling noises and distorted guitar textures overlapped by a slowly evolving hypnotic pulse formed by a deep bass. With LANDSCAPES Ulrich Troyer may already give us an aesthetical perspective of the last part of his SONGS FOR WILLIAM trilogy. All parts of the trilogy work independently from each other - but be aware: If you know one part, you want them all.