Legs and Birds. A new album by Mathias Götz aka Le Millipede. After two albums and a digital remix album on Alien Transistor, the trombonist releases a very special double album. Record #1 consists of ten “Legs” aka songs written, played, recorded and produced exclusively by Mathias Götz. Record #2 consists exclusively of bird calls recorded by Götz. Three record labels, Dhyana Records, Gutfeeling Records and Hausmusik have teamed up to make this incredible release possible. Legs and Birds will be released on January 20, 2023.
When he’s not listening to birds or recording himself humming in his kitchen, Mathias Götz performs with bands that have simple names like “Colour Haze” and “The Notwist” or complicated ones such as “Lovebrain’s Rose of Agra, Stringlane and Diskotäschchen, Mount Blakelock und die Orden der Nacht, supported by 85/86 CC, unspoken Space at Kreuz Giesing“. With the nine legs of “Le Millipede”, he has unleashed a project that has catapulted music into the art market (though unfortunately no wealthy collector has noticed this yet). He composed, recorded and mixed the tracks himself, and numbered them according to the first nine legs of his thousand-footed heraldic animal. So far, so pop. But then it was time to launch the sprawling Gesamtkunstwerk production, which was staged in all sorts of media , but not made available for purchase. The author Pico Be wrote a text describing “something with film” and exported the miniatures digitally into the cinematic.
In the end, only one (1!) single of each track was pressed: Frau Forster designed eight unique covers in eight various techniques for the nine tracks, in which the singles in the 1/1 edition were given to only one friend; only “legs” six and seven were released as a double-sided single in an edition of three. But now the whole world seems ready to receive this gift. All of this material became an LP with a mysterious bonus: an LP with bird calls, recorded by Mathias Götz himself. Pressed on record, however, the innocent song of the common linnet turns into an uncontrolled avant-garde attack.
The question of why an entire LP is filled with the twitter of birds remains unanswered, of course. “Why do the birds attack?” asked the philosopher Slavoj Žižek after viewing “The Birds” by Alfred Hitchcock. In Hitchcock’s film, the birds break into reality unexpectedly. They are the elemental force, the return of the repressed. Mathias Götz, however, is a friendly musician. His music is almost defiantly silent during the song of the feathered animals. Do the birds represent the unconscious of the music, perhaps? Now we can listen to the song of the corn bunting like a free-jazz tone cascade by John Coltrane. Because the birdsong, when it changes from forest to vinyl, suddenly becomes a difficult-to-understand art without key, meter, explainability or hookline: truly “free” music, a wonderful “Twittering Machine” (loosely based on Paul Klee), just as Mathias Götz’s music is.