Razen: Rain Without Rain LP

Rain and experimental music have had an interesting connection for decades. Perhaps as a reminder of the musical quality of rain, but knowing full well that it can only be enjoyed in theory, Razen call their new album Rain Without Rain. In the music of the Brussels collective led by the two multi-instrumentalists Brecht Ameel and Kim Delcour, it certainly pours down on the roofs. In fact, the album opens with the sound of pouring rain before we hear the sequence of an oscillator played through a guitar amp on the first track "Lazy, Lazy Eye." The album is the captivating result of a one-night mobile studio field recording in an abandoned pedestrian tunnel in the center of Düsseldorf, and it is finding beauty with brutal(ist) means: recorder, oscillator, guitar amp and reverberation, two musicians and four microphones, early electronics versus early music. "Suicide meet Hildegard von Bingen," as Stefan Schneider, who recorded the session, admits. "Ghostly occurrences," he adds. Brecht Ameel states: "We do put a lot of weight and care on acoustics. On some of our recordings, the room acts as another band member, or as the main 'mixing board'. Most of the albums we have recorded so far are not mixed in the traditional sense: they are simply 'captured,' and we let the room decide what is left on the tapes. The studio recordings, then, give us the possibility of bringing other elements to the fore; precision of interplay, or tiny variations in breathing." The group Razen has existed since 2010 and has since released numerous records on labels such as KRAAK, Marionette and Hands In The Dark. Rain Without Rain is their debut on the Düsseldorf label TAL. If there has been an increased international interest in experimental music from Belgium in recent years, this is not least due to musician collectives such as Razen. In terms of its electro-folkloristic intensity and instrumentation, Razen's music is quite unique worldwide.