Trapped in a Gasper Noé flick, Philipp Otterbach’s new album »The Dahlem Diaries« sends you into an existential tailspin and makes you wish you hadn’t smoked all that stuff in the first place. But every bad trip is preceded by the temptation to surrender to the unknown. »The Dahlem Diaries Pt 1« takes you on an eerie dive into Otterbach’s effects universe, where the guitar takes you by the hand and leads you through a series of mysterious field recordings. Through tracks like »Talkoot« and »Geolureed« you drift towards »Happy and I skipped«, where you stop for a moment and realise you ordered something and forgot to pick it up. As a digital-only bonus, »Chihiros Zauberland« includes the clerical response to the beginning: »The Dahlem Diaries Pt 2«. Compared to his previous albums, the introspective journey that Philipp Otterbach takes you on with »The Dahlem Diaries« is even more reduced and imbued with melancholy. So if you can still find a spot under a tree by the open-air pool at thirty-five degrees in the shade, you can drift off into a daydream with the musical diaries and simply »relax«, as the musician himself describes it. And if, in the end, the creative idea of the century falls from the tree into your lap, the trip will have been a success.
Ocean Moon
Ways To The Deep Meadow
Music From Memory