When the package arrives, it looks mysteriously identical to an LP package – and when you relieve the phonogram of its wrapping, you see that it IS a vinyl, and a double album at that, folding out like Bob Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde or Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma, and you wonder, what the hell… has Kaul fallen prey to the vinyl-as-an-art-object trend, or what is this… but, as you fold out the cover, you find a CD stuck onto the inside of the cover on one of those plastic Ogre Ogress center hole bumps, and you realize that the concept means that this is a thought through Gesamtkunstwerk – and there are no vinyls submitted either. In each of the two LP slots, you find leaflets, in German and English.

The title of this CD in a vinyl cover – Cover Versions – may have you think in terms of pop and rock covers. There are dance bands out there today trying to play well-known hits as similar to the original records as possible, and there used to be cover versions really early on, in the Fifties, when black hits had to be re-recorded by white artists to break the race barrier, get airplay on white stations and bring in the big money. However, Matthias Kaul’s Cover Versions enter on a more metaphysical level. There are no direct quotes or cover sections anywhere, but there are more than a few instances with the surface noise of heavily played vinyls.

A few of Kaul’s earlier CDs have been some kind of concept releases too, presented in art galleries, always with more aspects than just the musical one. He continues and amplifies this trait in Cover Versions.

Let me quote some explanatory text on the Cover Versions from the leaflet:

“[…] No melodies, no harmonies or beats reveal the originals. The titles serve as aids to understanding […]. Some elements of 1960s/1970s pop are found here, but in a completely different context: some […] details of arrangements […] and the repeated crackle of […] vinyl. […] Chilly Minutes refer to Donovan’s Catch the Wind, and Matthias Kaul’s version almost seems like a reverse of its flower power innocence.[…]” - (…But I don’t know what the author means with “flower power innocence”. That’s just a very stupid and ignorant cliché. I was around. It wasn’t more innocent than anything else, hell no.)

(This is a strange and disjointed record review. The one and only person whom I’ve known for all my 58 years – yes, like Matthias Kaul, this reviewer was born in 1949 – has just died; i.e. my beloved mother, who loved me unconditionally all my life. I could never be prepared for the feeling of it, I realize now, when I see that even the light is different, the air I breathe is changed. In one of the illustrations for this text, my mother can be seen close to a picture of the Dalai lama – and the totality if this picture, with the Earth, the Mother and the Dalai lama pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?
I had to insert this note, because I don’t want to stop writing, and the writing may turn out more jagged than Kaul’s artistry would call for... When I began this text some days ago, my mother was alive, but now she is not, and that is how it changes. I believe the full realization of the impermanence of life is what really shakes me. It is one thing to calculate impermanence, to intellectualize it – and another thing all together to be forced to fully realize it…)

In a certain way, Matthias Kaul’s new dream concept fits very well with my new situation, with my bewilderment and my breathless emptiness.

I listen to these sounds without mentioning their titles, since those may cloud the unmoderated impression of the sounds themselves, if one strives to find the sonic relevance to the titling.

The crackling pries open the moment as the virtual needle bores down into the vinyl. A bellish drone swells in modal might, measuring the space between the walls, and between floor and ceiling. Amplified cogwheels from inside the hull of a wristwatch provide a jingle-bell horse ride, as other Kaul percussions rustle like the wind through old sheds.

The initial bell-swell recedes, as do most other beginning sounds, but the wristwatch cog-wheel continues keeping the horse shoe beat through the lanes of dark European towns, and Kaul’s extraneous percussive incidents fare like stray thoughts through a restless mind, picking up a pebble here, a twig there… insignias of random worlds…

The murmur dies away like old age, as ripples on the surface of time jingle jangle and bleak light bears down heavily on the rusty hinges of dawn…

The celestial mechanic stirs his toolbox in Kaulean motions percussive, and splintered stars fall on Stockton… Aging rockers drive their Harleys down the wobbling path of geriatrics, on a saw-blade glissando that bores down into humus and clay, oral cavities growing dense with hard-packed soil as breath ceases and plant-life picks up. Dying comes hard on the living. Breathing is such a strong instinct. Life comes with heavy inertia. Dying is a real feat. It is hard to do it successfully.

The brief sitar incisions merely amplify the screw-and-bolt sensation of the toolbox, making for an ingenious universe contraption.

The wheezing, scraping, piercing rust rubatos stack painful sonorities tight to your ear; pain and pleasure! For a while, I think I’m visiting one of Stockhausen’s more wild intuitive pieces from the late Sixties. In fact, it seems Matthias Kaul covers all the versions here!

The whining properties gradually grow into an overwhelming magnificence, and Kaul keeps many counter-acting sounds going simultaneously, bending and prying at the flow like a mad log-driver in the midst of a mounting log-flow in the midst of a raging river.

The composer’s / musician’s masterly mix of tiny amplified sounds and truly horrendous sonorities at shipyard volumes enlighten my perception! Splendid it is!

Some intermediary sections sport loud, close vinyl crackles and a distant, fuzzy behind-the-wall rhythm from a neighbor’s gramophone!

Brittle, piercing metallic percussion at distorted volumes paint your existence in trembling gold and blinding silver, until more earthen sound-wares ground your anatomy gravity-wise, while the top of your mind rotates at break-neck velocities. Bending, bulging sounds spread gluey metal wave patterns, hither and thither: a kind of industrial jungle maze of audio; factory impressionism at the seam of industrialism and information age.

Cookie jar Gene Krupa bangs away! Racket at the breaking point!

I take a break and listen to Richard Gere reading Dalai lama’s The Universe In A Single Atom; a great recording across five CDs, which I sincerely recommend for breaks in between the sections of Matthias Kaul’s Cover Versions!

I’m back! You never even noticed the break, but then again you wouldn’t even have noticed my mother dying in all this, hadn’t I told you. What kind of world is this, anyhow?

Beautiful, high-pitch telegraph wire whines transport you across continents, perhaps across the Outback of Australia, which is where they keep all that space, all those vast plains. Kaul’s rattles sound like rattlers in the sand, better you watch out – and the high, shrill sonorities turn like rusty hinges in your mind, opening from one emptiness to another; the hingy monologue talking to itself inside this vastness.

Then, from inside of a dream – or from way, way inside the empty landscape – a rolling, guttural sonic motion paints the contour of a language. You feel the motion of a stream of words, see the outline of sentences and feel the general expressivity of a story – but it’s all painted on the window of perception with love and vagueness, only just coming across: the longing for conversation, for escape from desolation, no matter how illusory.

Phase-shifting layers of a curious content spread out up above, in a darkly colored saturation, holding Oriental brass and Medieval Western church music across the evening sky, eventually seeping into mysterious vocal incantations that seem to leak out of alternate dimensions, casting shadows and light of utter beauty and fright over our current lives. The sound worlds that Kaul achieves seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with the percussion you usually connect with the composer, but rather with gluey, semi-transparent spiritual residue out of shreds of dreams that drift by in a breeze of the mind. Beautiful! Scary! The spirits talk in my mouth!
My present vulnerability, in the wake of my goodhearted mother’s passing, makes me ridiculously sensitive to all fine-tuned impressions, and Matthias Kaul’s music couldn’t have fitted the situation better. His precarious, delicate sonorities move directly into the deepest realms of myself, blooming in violet, maroon and gold in my guarded sanctuary of sorrow. I meet this music at exactly the right time. This music travels onto my current topography like a pathfinder of the soul, bringing me on home to myself.