The debut, self-titled album from German trio Schatterau: 15 elegant miniature pieces made with an old 4-track cassette recorder, offering a lo-fi walk through a patchwork of warm, nostalgic, dreamlike and strangely familiar soundscapes.
Having dug out their old 4-track cassette recorder, the group turned it into their primary instrument, spending many hours exploring textures, creating countless tape loops and weaving them into this elegantly crafted inaugural work of 15 miniatures.
At times, some of these fully realised, lo-fi ambient tales have a warm dream-like feel to them; the seemingly familiar then forms a powerful nostalgic statement. By contrast, some of those song-based vignettes tell poignant stories of blank space, self-alienation, impenetrable silence and growing up in the post-GDR era in a small town on the East German Baltic Sea.
The patchwork of mysterious soundscapes presented by Schatterau unravel their secret as the journey goes by, making the listening of this impressively generous debut a playful experience, an inviting mellow walk down one’s own inner memory lane.
Schatterau is a Hamburg and Berlin-based three-piece consisting of Daniel Jahn, Jonas Meyer and Tobias Rutkowski.
