album review: 'gelb / rosa / schwarz' by patricia taxxon

I’ve reviewed Patricia Taxxon a lot through the few years - and more to the point, I like reviewing her music. She’s a fascinating artist who likes tackling big themes and when her ear for gleaming, transcendent melody, be they in plunderphonics or soft-focus bedroom pop or ambient music or the deconsructed electro bangers that leap across genre with aplomb, when she hits that synthesis there isn’t much like it. And for a while she was so prolific in putting out projects that it almost became impossible for me to keep up, especially in 2018 and parts of 2019 - and I’ll admit, some of her work just started sounding kind of spotty, or not quite hitting the transcendence I knew she could, especially when she was able to nail it across so many genres. The best moments of Punk and Victory Lap are plunderphonics gems, the ambience of Cicada many hold as her best work, although I’m still going to point to some of the understated shy notes of Paul as my personal favourite, even if I would put The Art State, Traveller, and Foley Artist as projects you should hear to get the full picture.

And 2020 has been good for her thus far: I can admit the glassy tones of Jyväskyläj weren’t for me, but Rainbow Road expanded on a lot of the synthwave of Traveller in an appealing way… but really, it was a warmup for what I knew was coming: a triple album, inspired by the 1920s Oskar Schlemmer ballet Triadisches Ballett, where not only was she experimenting with new melodic structures in composition, but also the sort of thematic heft that I’d argue underscores her most potent work; the jokey, half-formed experiments are fun, but even when I disagree with her philosophically this is the stuff that I really like peeling into. So, what did we get from her Das Triadisches Ballett trilogy?

So here’s the thing: Patricia Taxxon only put one of the albums on my schedule to cover, given that you could view them as standalone projects and they’re all pretty hefty in terms of length and runtime and feature a lot of thematic echoes across them, so technically reviewing one might suffice. So naturally what I did was listen to all three projects and come to the stark conclusion that… hell, it’s like only reviewing one movement of a ballet, you need all three to get the full thematic picture, there’s a lot going on! It’s also why I wanted to split this into its own review, because I’d argue there’s some historical context to how she’s assembled this project that I woiuldn’t otherwise have time to fuse into a short On The Pulse segment. I’d also argue there’s a compositional density to how Taxxon is building her pieces that she goes into more intriguing depth than I do on her channel, so while I’ll touch briefly on some of it when appropriate, my analysis will target slightly different places. If you want the short form of it before we get to the mini-history lesson, it’s probably her most layered and cohesive work in a long time, and while I don’t think there are individual moments that match the very best songs in her discography, each disc can stand alone as having unique strengths in their own right and do hold among her best work.

But to explain what she’s looking to explore here, let me start by establishing the ballet that Taxxon is drawing upon, because while it’s well-known in avant-garde ballet, I can imagine most of my audience might not be subject matter experts here. So, 1920s, abstract and modern art is starting to come into vogue in Germany, the Bauhaus school is flourishing, and Oskar Schlemmer chooses to adapt a series of poems set to music from Arnold Schoenberg called Pierrot Lunaire, three sets of seven poems. The first movement focuses on love, sex and religion, the second on violence, crime and blasphemy, the third… a little more abstract, but a pensive reflection upon all of it, especially circling back to the home. There’s a lot of consistent numerology that run through the works, it’s a pretty intricate piece that has fascinated avant-garde artists for decades, and in 1996 Bjork herself performed a version of it. But Schlemmer was looking to do something different in his ballet, specifically surrounding how the human body might be perceived in motion and dance, so drawing upon principles of abstraction, for each of the three movements the costuming and colour palette was very blocky and angular, where any movement would emphasize the artificiality of the performance. Schlemmer believed that an aesthetic superiority could be found in stylizing the dancers in costume almost as marionettes or puppets, a purely abstract, artificial figurine, where through the wild, Dionysian, creative impulse or dance married to the strict, Apollonian geometry of modern art, a powerful tension could be explored. And there’s truth to that: it matches the purity of an abstract, constructed aesthetic with the humanity that you can’t quite deconstruct away, modernism in tension with postmodernism - or as a topic I’m looking to explore at length in a video essay several months from now for different reasons, metamodernism.

And I bring all of this up because not only Patricia Taxxon drawing some pretty faithful parallels to both Pierrot Lunaire and Triadisches Ballet just now translated to the increased deconstruction of electronic music, it becomes a foundation point for how and where she expands and updates the themes. For instance, not only as Taxxon shown a fondness for metamodernism before, but I can also hear spot the trans subtext here as well: the clash between the constructed body and the freeform human spirit where gender’s coding in abstraction is distinct, especially in ballet. The next notable difference is that she’s included a cover on each album, the first a deconstructed cover of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Sir Duke’ - which may be her passing shot at Jacob Collier’s similar interpretation proving she can do it better - the second being of ‘What A Wonderful World’ by Louis Armstrong - arguably the weakest and I’ll get to why in a minute - and finally of ‘Paper Planes’ by M.I.A., a song where its appeal is entirely linked to a juxtaposition between pure swagger and sneering irony; amazingly this one grew on me. And the tonal parallel is striking as well: Gelb takes the flamboyant boistrousness of the first movement and gives it a musical palette of percussive, speaker-destroying bro-step; Rosa is more delicately paced and intricate but can still bring bombastic percussion energy splattered across the drum machine snares; and Schwarz is probably the most restrained and atmospheric, but it’s also where Taxxon can showcase some of her most spacious and potent ambient-adjacent passages to date. Now across the entire project there’s a maximalist approach to its mixing and mastering that can already feel like a lot in singular pieces on other albums, let alone a full triple album at nearly three hours, but I’d argue the bigger gripe is how it can start to overwhelm the underlying compositional tension in each piece. For instance, Gelb is the most manic and warping of the projects, but there’s a fluttery intricacy on cuts like ‘Jackrabbit’ that show a compositional tact that you wouldn’t expect for head-banging bro-step; hell, some of those howling moments jump onto Rosa’s compositions, which are the most jittery and layered and showing the most obvious Anna Meredith parallels, but midway through we get a strikingly beautiful strings piece on ‘The Delivery’, that Taxxon commissioned from some anonymous folks on fiverr, bringing a more solemn but poignant weight. And for as fuzzy and detached as Schwarz can occasionally seem, it’s probably the most quietly inviting and comforting listen of the trio, showing the sort of production dynamics that I honestly wish felt a bit more prevalent as a whole.

That said, there are changes from the original poems in terms of themes, specifically across Gelb and Rosa. Where it was a more conventional ‘light to darkness’ duality between the first two movements originally, there’s a transitory, apocalyptic undercurrent to both stories spanning past, present and an uncertain future. Where Gelb is more focused on a tension exposed the wonky contradictions of late capitalism, veneers of collapsing decadence balanced against a more humble reality, where the ‘Columbine’ character gains a very stark bit of subtext through the modern usage of the word, Rosa looks to preserve whatever faint, lovestruck moments that can survive, where the most delicate melodies will hold forth the most. But it also makes sense in the larger arc across all three albums - the original set of poems was a journey and ultimately upon reflection returned home… but with our world the way it is, Taxxon’s arc takes her away from the world towards the depths of the unknown, with comfort being found not just in the fragile artifacts left behind, but that the music of the spheres will transcend and last… which might be why the melancholy of Schwarz has such weight, like the vocaloid Cyber Diva providing the fluttery delivery opposite the beautiful piano line on ‘Something Pretty’ - pretty much the apotheosis of what Schlemmer was seeking, the figurine where humanity still shows through.

Now as much as I can find this as a fascinating classics exercise in intricate modern art, the vast majority of people do not know nor care about any of this, the hinge that hangs on so much metamodernist tension is that the underlying compositions have to expose that fragile humanity and all the artifice in the world won’t save it if the compositions or production don’t hold up. And I’d argue there are flaws here, the biggest coming in how until Schwarz, this can be an exhausting listen, a little choppy and underweight in the groove, the gummy warping clanks will be a lot for any listener, not always as dynamic as it could be, and man, it can sound very shrill very fast, especially as the pummelling bro-step elements are echoed across all three albums and probably could have just been left to the first; yes, I know it’s purposeful, but it can fracture the more delicate vibe on both Rosa and Schwarz; thank God ‘Bauhaus’ picked up some actual melody on its back half to elevate it from the distended, broken farts that dominate the track. And some of this is up to interpretation on how the execution lands: take, for instance, ‘What A Wonderful World’, an inspired choice for the cover given its soft-focus warmth but an undercurrent of aged melancholy, a moment of beauty for the now leading into a world he won’t see to come… but with the huge, fluttery bombast on the back half of the arrangement, it just can’t connect as powerfully as the original. And it’s in all of that whirling, glassy flutters where I’d argue Taxxon takes the most chances in her embrace of microtonal composition… and I’ll be honest, it doesn’t always work. No outright faceplants - but they can’t all be stunners like the striking title track overture of ‘Gelb’, the wiry electro flare of ‘Jackrabbit’, the stuttering sparkling elegance of ‘New Plains’ and ‘Old Ways’, the shuddering sweep of the takeoff behind the title track of ‘Schwarz’, the huge fuzzy gloss of ‘Escape’ and ‘Fly’, and the beautiful whistling gleam of ‘Chorus’. Hell, for as heretical as it is, I really liked the demented, goopy cover of ‘Sir Duke’ especially with the organ timbres slid in.

But as a whole, Patricia Taxxon has described this triple album as something close to her magnum opus thus far… and while I think she’s got a world of even wider possibilities ahead, this is an achievement with thematic heft and intricacy that shows her most ambition to date. The effort absolutely shows through, and I wouldn’t say there’s a moment here that feels slapdash or rushed, and while there are flaws - it’s a very long sit, she probably could have incorporated a few more hooks, especially on Rosa given a density to this project that might be intimidating, and I wouldn’t be averse to where and when she’ll take her arrangement beyond just pure electronics, especially as there are moments that prove she’s got an ear for those tones - they’re minor. And while I’m a complete sucker to this sort of thematic extrapolation and philosophy, I still think she’s yet to truly deliver her masterpiece, although I’d say this is probably her best work since either Cicada or Paul, and I think Schwarz on its own can stand in or above that group. And that’s why this is an 8/10 for me and a big recommendation. It’s a challenging listen and it’s absolutely not a jump-on point, but if you’re up for one of the most dense but thrilling electronic albums you’ll hear in 2020, you should check out this trilogy post-haste; you won’t be disappointed.