Album Review: Apparat - Krieg und Frieden (Music for Theatre)

After nearly ten albums in about as many years, Apparat certainly knows his stuff. The electronic artist has dabbled in IDM, glitch and ambient music to varying degrees of success, but always with a sincere and interesting approach. However, this is likely his most left-field release yet. Krieg und Frieden (Music for Theatre) is an album version of a soundtrack score to a theatrical adaptation of War & Peace. 'Unique' almost begins to cover it.

The music itself is largely minimal drone with classical string section accompaniment. The tracks are pulsing, inward looking and quite obviously narrative driven – a point clear even when the music is presented without the theatrical work. It is certainly 'abstract music', with darker passages calling to mind the recent work of Tim Hecker (high praise indeed).

The more playful tunes, like K&F Thema, open the music up a little and help the tone escape the trap of monotony that so many less experienced dark ambient and drone artists fall into, as do the occasional breaks into modern beat driven techno (such a description is not often applied to Tolstoy's work). As great as the record is, and it is great, it isn't a complete success. The music, presented here on its own, still sounds like accompaniment audio – especially on vocal tracks like Light On. Without the original theatre work here, the music does become background noise in several moments – even though it does avoid this failure much better than most soundtrack releases.

Interesting, occasionally challenging and brilliant, this drone-cum-neoclassical record should appeal to most people with a bent for the introspective and creepy.