M. Ostermeier: "Suspended"

To be suspended can mean any of several things. If you work in a circus, it can mean ropes, drum rolls, and a possible spell in traction. If you’re a bridge-builder, it means “bring cables.” If you’re former Maryland shoegaze star M. Ostermeier, the brains behind post-rockers Should, ‘suspended’ could mean the moment in the flotation tank when M decided to ditch the guitars, and bathe himself in a slower kind of noise. Ostermeier hales from Baltimore, and like The Wire, he’s married to his own kind of needle: as well as setting up the Words On Music record label and doing mixes for For Against, he’s recently switched genres to ambient/classical, with two minimal mini-albums out this year already (Percolate and Lakefront, worthy names for a possible Wire buddy spin-off). With the intros to his new approach now out in circulation he’s sent a full-length to new imprint Tench; his first record to take his ghostly new melodies on a ghostly ten track meander. You have to wonder what M’s round-the-clock music habit does for time he’s meant to spend with his loved ones. His brother/ex-bandmate Eric probably thinks he’s got crack phials piled in the studio.

The reality is the studio’s surprisingly spartan, and Ostermeier instead gets high by using sparse instrumentation to fuel mood. We’re talking mega sparse here, by the way: “Suspended,” the third cut from Chance Reconstruction, uses hesitant piano chords to break through a wall of unrelenting tape steam. M’s pensive blend of thinking, pauses, poignancy and pauses recalls West German fairy story The Princess and the Warrior (2000), while his balance of detail and emotive ivories give minimalism its own little heart. It won’t be to everyone’s tastes—the rain effects and glass crickets, for example, will throw those who came looking for shoegaze—but the track has a way of trickling down into you, like Chinese water done nicely. Ostermeier mounts a solid case for floating/thinking/being suspended, and made me flicker back to my own brush with the term: the time my brother got suspended from school for blowing out the wiring in the French block (never ask a mechanic to sit a vocabulary test, never under any circumstances). Now if he had starred in a West German fairy story, “Suspended” might be playing as he shuffles out the gates, his two-weeks-of-freedom punishment in front of him. As he steps off the pavement the pianos strike up, then die in a loop of slow rainfall. That, class, is how you subdue a rock urge.