Among its various claims to noteworthiness, Würzburg in northern Bavaria has a historic association with Richard Wagner: he was appointed chorusmaster of the municipal theatre in 1833 and wrote his first performed opera, Die Feen (‘the Fairies’) while living there. The city of 130,000 on the banks of the Main is also the birthplace of Dallas Mavericks power forward Dirk Nowitzki, heralded by many as the great European basketball player of all time.
Yet to students of ambient spookiness suffused in Teutonic foreboding, Würzburg has an altogether different distinction. It is the base of operations of composer Christian Schoppik, who has moved through a series of drone-adjacent, loop-based projects across his career and now serves as the ghostly figure clanking chains at the heart of Läuten der Seele.
Forget Götterdämmerung or slam dunking NBA all-stars: Schoppik is a wizard of the low-key weird whose spectral tunes induce a trance-like sense of foreboding. He has a parallel existence as one half of the self-described “dark folk” duo Brannten Schnür. Flying solo, the folk has been expunged and the darkness is unfettered and often (though not always) all-pervading.
Läuten der Seele translates as “ringing of the soul” – a title that proves apt as Schoppik releases his latest album under the moniker. Ominous one moment, light-limbed and spiritually transcendent the next, the fourteen tracks possess the quality of reverberations dredged up from the deepest recesses of human thought, form and experience.
Like a bath drawn to slightly the wrong temperature, Unterhaltungen mit Larven und Überresten (“Conversations with Larvae and Remains”) requires slow, careful immersion. Sampled voices and found footage drift in and out like a radio dial operated by a Ouija board. Minute by minute, it is unsettling – and yet, in totality, the results are peculiarly comforting. By the end, you feel that you and Schoppik have been through something together – a not entirely reassuring undertaking, but one that has been worth the effort.
It begins, as these affairs often do, with a deluge of static and then a sonorous voice in mellifluent German. The first track, ‘Anklopfen’, translates as “Knock” and has the feeling of a portal opening and of a swell of gravity drawing the listener inward and downwards – not towards hell, exactly, but certainly to a cold and purgatorial place.
A great deal of this record is rooted in dissonance and the hint of a melody – a fragment of a fragment, a portrait drawn with smoke. But there are relatively conventional tunes, too, under the topsoil of static. With its suggestion of a cooed vocal, ‘Das Alles Dass’ carries echoes of Sigur Rós in their “Soundtracking David Attenborough” Takk period. The true curveball is ‘Letzte Lichter’ (“Last Lights”), which jump scares the unsuspecting listener by taking the form of a more or less conventional song, with Schoppik’s stark, earnest singing reminiscent of David Bowie on side two of Low or Heroes.
A mysterious album takes its leave with another puzzle. The closing number translates as “An English Song”, but what does it mean, what does it mean? No English is audible – instead, a haunting burbling skitters back and forth, and the distant squeal of a violin makes its presence felt through the veil. The effect is dystopian and menacing yet hypnotic too. Schoppik has taken his audience to some dark and occasionally scary places, but in ways that are consistently absorbing and quietly spellbinding. Having emerged from his tunnel of terror, you want to buckle up and go back around again.
