Hometown: Munich.
The lineup: Leo Hopfinger (vocals, music).
The background: This week we won’t be making a claim, as we are prone to do in this column, for a new act’s potential stardom, but we will argue for their artistic excellence. Leo Hopfinger, who records as LeRoy is a Munich-based enigma. His music is as Teutonic as it is toytown-ish. It is playful and inventive, quirky and quizzical, suggestive of a restless mind, the result of a “musician” – term used advisedly – piecing together sound collages using fragments of noise and field recordings. His approach is DIY, his equipment lo-fi.
And yet, for all that, notwithstanding our warning at the start, be assured that the end product is not the abstract din you might expect. Rather LeRoy’s (mostly) instrumentals, released on Disko B (Chicks on Speed, DJ Hell), could be snippets of well-known pop backing tracks, only cut up and reassembled in the wrong order, then treated to various tempo-changing tricks. “I try to spread the gap between abstract and pop as far as possible,” he says, explaining that he had completed a series of far more “crowd-pleasing songs”, but they were binned as he pursued a more esoteric and experimental direction.
His music is a puzzle in terms of the way it is put together, and it is puzzling, in a good way. What is that? Where is it from? What era is this? It is timeless and placeless, even if, as we say, the techniques he employs to achieve a pleasant sense of disorientation have their echoes (and there is a lot of echo here – and reverb and delay) in dub. Krautrock, too - you can’t necessarily tie what he does to any single early-70s German band (although Faust have been cited as a reference point for one of his tracks) but you get the impression he had their general idiosyncratic methods in mind when he was assembling this stuff. Skai, the first track on the accompanying playlist, taken from LeRoy’s Skläsh EP, is acoustic and rhythmic, with a repetitive, cyclical glockenspiel pattern and a beat made from something wooden, making you think of techno if it had been invented in a period before electricity. Ktulus Return starts off slow, spartan, with a satisfying sucking sound to the beat – you imagine LeRoy poring over his laptop, in search of the perfect squelch. There is an equal attention to balancing organic and electronic sounds. Untitled Long Time opens with some sparkling exotica and what sounds like the inner mechanics of a timepiece doing the boogaloo, all of which provides the rhythm for a sample of someone (possibly Sam Cooke himself, only warped) singing A Change Is Gonna Come. Like a Disease is 13 mesmeric minutes of tinny machine sputters, bubbles popping, spindly guitar and ghostly female voices – think 1981 Byrne/Eno via Public Service Broadcasting and Lee Perry, locked in Conny Plank’s studio in Cologne. It’s the Skläsh aesthetic writ large, and you can dance to it.
The truth: He’s a one man Munich Machine.
Most likely to: Achieve flow motion.
Least likely to: Appear in a monster movie.
What to buy: Skläsh is released on 16 October by Schamoni Musik/Disko B.
File next to: John Maus, Faust, Cybotron, Golden Teacher.
Links: Facebook.com/leroy
Ones to watch: Startzy, Jodie Abacus, Bird Dog, Gems, Shelter Point.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion