The latest project by Alexander Hacke and Danielle de Picciotto, who make music under the name hackedpiccioto, documents a crucial turn in their lives.
After spending nearly a decade and a half leading what they call a “nomadic” existence, recording in places as diverse as the Mojave Desert, Blackpool, and Naples, they decided to put down roots on the outskirts of Berlin, in a rural area close to where Hacke grew up.
In some respects, Lichtung continues the approach hackedepicciotto refined over the previous decade, fusing traditional and modern instruments to create a sound that refuses easy categorisation.
But Lichtung makes heavier use of electronics, bringing Hacke back to his early explorations in music-making. It’s also the duo’s first record with exclusively German lyrics, a significant shift for the American-born de Picciotto, who had continued writing in her native tongue despite being part of Berlin’s experimental art scene for almost forty years.
As the album’s liner notes note, these changes reflect their mixed feelings about contemporary existence. On the one hand, they wanted to settle down. On the other hand, they were acutely aware that the impulse to ground themselves in a rural German setting could be misinterpreted as a repudiation of what they have stood for as artists.
The album opens with the title track, which refers to a clearing in a forest. Although a seemingly innocent geographical feature, the word is weighed down by the way philosopher Martin Heidegger used it.
Not only is Heidegger a perversely difficult thinker, fond of neologisms and rule-breaking syntax, but his legacy will also be forever tarnished by his enthusiastic support for the Nazi regime in its early years. To invoke “Lichtung”, then, is to confront the German language’s most troubling associations head-on.
This explains the sense of lurking menace that permeates the whole album. Even though the music is mostly slow and serene, it is shadowed by sounds that recall Hacke’s long tenure in the band Einstürzende Neubauten.
De Picciotto’s hesitant piano also complicates the picture, giving the songs it graces the feel of a soundtrack from the heyday of psychedelic cinema.
In general, Lichtung communicates a kinship with the German counterculture that gave us Krautrock, when bands like Faust would jam for hours on end in spaces that had more in common with rural barns than urban clubs.
When most music fans think of Berlin, they imagine a world dominated by darkness and metal, an unforgiving environment where the cutting edge is sharp enough to cut you to the bone.
But the city is actually the antithesis of that image, a surprisingly vast territory with big lakes and a great many trees.
Although suburban sprawl has never dominated the German landscape as it does in other developed countries, its absence is felt most strongly in the Berlin metropolitan area.
Berlin has a strange relationship with the territory just outside its borders.
The most obvious reason for this is that West Berlin was a political island from the late 1940s until the end of the Cold War. But the city already felt different from other metropoles before this period of isolation. The 1920 annexation that incorporated towns like Wedding and Moabit into Berlin proper created a cityscape more like that of Los Angeles than those of other European capitals.
In a sense, Lichtung is a tribute to this other Berlin, the one that natives know and love, but which perplexes people unfamiliar with the city.
When Hacke sings “Ich bleibe stehen” (I am staying here), he is doing more than communicating hackedepicciotto’s decision to stop travelling around the world. He is declaring that they have broken with the Berlin of David Bowie, his old band, and the Love Parade co-founded by de Picciotto.
Voltaire ends Candide with an injunction to cultivate one’s garden instead of seeking greener pastures elsewhere. Although the tale is a savage satire of excessive optimism, this closing advice feels sincere.
And so does Lichtung’s celebration of staying home, appreciating the small things in life without losing sight of the dangers threatening to destroy them.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
