Keeping it surreal

There are some questions you just have to ask. Even if you know it’s probably going to kill the conversation stone dead.

hotpress had one of those moments last week, when we inquired of Kalabrese if his new album Rumpelzirkus is a “minimal house” record. The previously effusive Swiss suddenly got a bit short. “I don’t care about style. You can call it anything.”
Yeah, we knew we shouldn’t have asked. We just wanted to know what he’d call it, because we were having difficutly.
“You can call it rumpelhouse or rumpelfunk – with my friend (fellow Swiss producer) Crowdpleaser, we started to call our music rumpelsound, because we use a lot of fortuities and accidents and obscure sounds – doors slamming, kitchen sounds – mistakes, chaos, emotions: rumpel.”
On to more important matters. If you’re the kind of person that flicks through an album, Rumpelzirkus is one that might pass you by. A cursory listen reveals the usual: some dancefloor numbers, a few downtempo excursions, the odd guest vocalist.
But listen again, and you start noticing more. Kalabrese operates at the far corners of minimal, the outer reaches – a place that draws on a wider expanse of rhythms, sounds and styles. Sacha Winkler lists his influences as “authentic musicians – Coltrane, Fela Kuti, Funkadelic, Cat Power, The Sea And The Cake, Jose Gonzales – and a lot of Herbert.”
The 11 tracks are infused with a refreshing spirit and playfulness, the je ne sais quoi that's absent from the majority of music within this genre. Sacha describes the album as having a “deep funk”, which hotpress attributes to his extensive use of live instruments.
“On most of the tracks, I used different live ones to record riffs, harmonies, sounds – I never use plug-ins, it's almost all analog sounds. I composed the parts at home myself, and then called all the musicians (seven in total, including vocalists) in to play their parts.”
In places it feels like a jam, captured but barely reined in by Winkler.
“It sounds like that, but in the end I always arrange and edit with Logic – but of course there are always parts I don't edit because the live feel is so important.”
Winkler’s grand vision comes together perfectly on tracks like ‘Aus Dem Hof’ – a slow-creeping Afro-influenced houser with surging brass and a rambling ode to dancing (presumably under the influence) until the small hours – and ‘Hide’.
Mind you, it’s not always perfect. Some will find his nonsensical, non-musical vocal off-putting, but this is part of the charm.
Perversely, his lack of vocabulary adds to the album’s surrealist appeal – indeed, Rumpelzirkus is like looking at a painting from that oeuvre. The more you look, the more you see.
If the music within Rumpelzirkus is subtle, the cover's the opposite: a striking image of a blood-splattered (well, paint, but you know what we mean) black-suit-clad Winkler. Standing against a red-flecked white wall, he’s gazing blankly down at his mid-riff. There’s no mention of it, but it more than hints at heartbreak.
“I started working on my album in 2006. But during this time, I split up with my girlfriend of nine years. My studio was in the loft we both shared, so I had to move somewhere else. Some of the tracks were influenced by the split.
"Did I achieve what I wanted with the record? At the start, I wanted to make a funny, freaky, funky album – but now most of the songs sound melancholic.”
Rumpelzirkus is out on Stattmusik in April. A four-track vinyl sampler, Part One, is available now.