POP
Tosca
photo credit: Markus Roessle
No Hassle
(!K7 Records) The Viennese duo called Tosca may take their name from the Puccini opera, but this plugged in pair doesn't usually have romantic intrigue and mezzo-sopranos in mind when they compose. With No Hassle, they've made an album that goes deeper than the chillout lounge. It may not make it onto the dance floor, but it will reverberate across the ballroom in your head with a sultry beckoning call and warm embrace.
Richard Dorfmeister and Rupert Huber are eclectic musicians, avant-garde bred, jazz besotted and electronically wired. Their music, going back to their 1997 debut with "Chocolate Elvis," has always mixed heady atmospheres with sly asides and No Hassle is no different. But the mood is purely seductive here on tracks like "Birthday" with Julie McCarthy intoning a poem of "heaven's embroidered cloths" and "dreams laid" at your feet while her knowing chorus moans "Get Away."
Tosca eschews conventional song forms and dramatic arcs on "No Hassle." Each track establishes a sonic terrain and plays around inside it. They slide some blues guitar into "Joe Si Ha," a hypnotic track that offers a midnight drive through burnt neon plains. Space age keyboards, funky guitar riffs, non sequitur spoken word fragments and jazzy grooves circulate through the CD in a grab-bag of sonic references that cohere more often than they should, like on "Rosa," which mixes more blues guitar with country acoustic reverb-drenched strumming, a swirling keyboard, and conga rhythm. The result is intoxicating, especially when the guitar hits a Hawaiian-style slide. As part of the duo Kruder & Dorfmeister, Richard Dorfmeister hit the scene with sampling electronica in 1993, about the same time as Moby. "Raymondo" recalls Moby's Play both with its moody keyboard-based atmospheres and the soulful field recording calling out a fragment over an insistent groove.
The second disc is a live concert from the Ars Electronica festival in Switzerland, for which No Hassle was originally conceived. If anything, it's an even more immersive experience, with alternate mixes and piano soliloquies in a seamless performance.
Tosca's No Hassle is electronica's answer to "Don't Worry, be Happy," a soundtrack to "turn off your mind, relax and float downstream."
Every day, John Diliberto tunes in and chills out to an ambient world on Echoes, a music soundscape.
Copyright © 2012, Pennsylvania Public Radio Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2012, Pennsylvania Public Radio Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
