Description
Downtempo / Dub / House … Berlin’s venerated underground lynchpin arrives at her first solo record since the outstanding ‘I Put A Record On’ (2007) and her first new output since the excellent ‘Baustelle’ (2010) with AGF as Greie Gut Fraktion. It’s fair to say that few have done as much for Berlin’s world-famous art and music scene as this broadcaster, label owner, promoter, and all-round activist who has worked with everyone from Blixa Bargeld to Thomas Fehlmann and Frieder Butzmann. So with this in mind, every new Gudrun Gut record is worthy of closer inspection and ‘Wildlife’ certainly holds up under the microscope. Dubby, technoid electronic textures form the natural bedrock for the most part, whether it’s her canny cover of ‘Simply The Best’ or the slow, looping, Faitche-like exotica of ‘Little Nothing’. But its her deeply engrained sense of songcraft and experimentalism that’s key to the learned contrariness of ‘Wildlife’. In contrast with the worksite sonorities of ‘Baustelle’, she took to her countryside retreat in Uckermark, 1 or 2 hours outside Berlin to record this album, and uses field recordings of birds, mooing cows and breezy atmosphere to lend a lusher feel. Yet for its organic fingerprints, she can’t escape the allure of sleek techno-pop in her ‘Garten’, and the Herbert-like throb of ‘How Can I Move’, while ‘Tiger’ could be taken as a neat reflection of what lies rustling in the bushes of crepuscular countryside. Admittedly, some cuts do sound slightly dated, as with the dopey lope of ‘Leaves Are Falling’ and the simplistic techno of Kommune 12′, however they’re blips on an otherwise endearing and crafty album which neatly straddles the worlds of post-techno and avant-rooted ambient pop music.
