Silken Tofu/Topheth Prophet
Behind Anemone Tube is Stefan Hanser, a gifted musician who might not release much, but always astonishes with the sounds that hit the street as well as his live-performances.
Being a co-production between the Belgian Silken Tofu and the Israeli Topheth Prophet, ‘Death Over China’ is actually the first full-time album since 2001 by Stefan alone. In between he did release some collaborations – one of them with none other then Christian Renou of Brume fame – and only last year a mini CD with DVD were released by the before mentioned Silken Tofu.
So a full album, being as beautifully designed as this one, gives us high expectations. And all of them are without any doubt fulfilled to the maximum. 45 minutes are divided into 6 tracks and starting with the first tones in ‘Black Dead Rise’ we are guided by an obviously gifted musician through a part of the world where things aren’t as they seem.
The music is a combination of well chosen / found / recorded sounds, beautiful pads and sounds in well arranged compositions, topped with aggressive and intriguing noises of unknown origin. The constant shifting of layers makes each track a little party in your brain, because at the moment you think you’re “in”, you notice there as been changes in other perspectives or layers of that track you’re listening to.
‘The Desecration From Within’ is the final track of the album and from a combination of drones, ambient and noisy soundscapes which made this album a beauty to begin with, suddenly the music turns almost into power electronics! With this last track Anemone Tube shows us that he is capable of way more then what we could expect to begin with.
The field-recordings were recorded in China on a trip Stefan made in 2007. That same trip was the time when he made the pictures which form the base for the artwork, which shows his professional background / daytime job as a graphic designer as well.
To say it in one word: BUY!
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