Tomorrow Wonderland by TRIO HEINZ HERBERT with Dominic Landolt, Ramon Landolt, Mario Hänni

“We are all attracted to equal rights for sound - the quiet, in harmonic, the zoom in the zoom out, field recording, 4/4, polyrhythms, in sync - out of sync, trying to give each of these ideas or concepts equal significance and using these as a starting point to create music that is structured in a non-traditional way” Trio Heinz Herbert

Tomorrow Wonderland is the 5th album by Swiss outfit Trio Heinz Herbert; a propulsive, unfolding and gaudy journey. Two years in the making and the culmination of over 12 years of communal living as they work and play together. This is a record that transports us to protean sonic landscapes, situating but stretched and slipping with the trio’s unique time-bending skills.

Whilst THH may have started life studying Jazz and electro-acoustic music with mentors like Earl Howard, Mary Halverson and Gerry Hemingway, placing Tomorrow Wonderland within those fields would be like describing Solaris as a sci-fi film - i.e woefully inadequate.

For Trio Heinz Herbert - like J Dilla in Hip-Hop, Juan Atkins in Techno and Jaki-Liebezeit in “Krautrock” are profound Ryhthmanalysts. They squeeze the rich history of electronic music through a sieve, to discover their own strange harmonies, elegant micro-timings, and saturated lush colours. They run this sonic mulch, in collaboration with their trusted producer Manuel Egger - through obsolete hardware sampling-synthesisers and the sophisticated use of guitar treatments; discarding well-worn forms to conjure new mental and aural geographies for the listener.

Trio Heinz Herbert’s music foregrounds images, feelings and sensations. These are specific to their own personal space-time universe and swing between the abstract and the concrete. At times it feels like THH are soundtracking a foraging hunt for highly-prized matsutake mushrooms in the remote human-disturbed forests of the Pacific Northwestern. Whilst other tracks invoke the seedy, magenta tinged tones of the German auteur filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

The warm and enveloping sound-world of Tomorrow Wonderland begins with the mysterious “Your World - Your Wilderness” where the trio carefully walk us out across fields and forests before leaving us to navigate their mist covered wilderness on our own. Starting with a Laurie Spiegel- inspired arpeggio, skillfully played by Landolt on his ARP synthesiser and accompanied by a simple but effective shaker rhythm. But THH soon push us out of our comfort zone - with hints of a more complex narrative to come.

This journey really begins with The Stretch, with its granular textured harmonic guitar and lopsided beat. We get the sense that drummer Haenni has studied and annotated Jaki Liebzeit’s dot-dash system whilst finding his own style within
this method. Around half-way across the track, the groove is dropped and taken up instead by a sequenced kick. In a 1995 interview in The Wire, Karlheinz Stockhausen offered advice to a young Aphex Twin- his main criticism of AFX was that (at that time) his rhythms were too repetitive. Trio Heinz Herbert perhaps allude to this problem when they drop their own 4/4 beats. Immediately the flow and groove is wiped and Haenni’s role as time-keeper shifts to one of percussive embellisher. This feels like an effortless firing off of complex trains of thoughts, like a form of haptic communication.

The Near and Far is reminiscent of a lost Ryuichi Sakamoto or David Sylvian soundtrack. Guitarist Dominic Landolt
describes the track as a paean to high-rise living “I live on the 22nd floor and I love watching the infinite movie that is the sky and clouds unfolding over long periods of gazing”.

Flying over solid ground with its bit-crushed and aliasing loop introduces a break one imagines Pete Rock would nod along to. Slow glacial synth melodies contrast with the Trio’s trademark ecosystem- sounding like a host of sub-aquatic creatures and plants breathing and reproducing.

The epic finale Tomorrow Wonderland is for me, akin to walking up a Scottish munro. The monotony of a barren heather-covered landscape, combined with illusory false summits and the changeable highland tundra weather; which eventually gives way to the epiphany that is the summit. We’re far above the clouds now, taking in incredible geological strata formed from the remains of 350 million year old volcano. Aurally we’re also in unknown territory - well except for perhaps some of our most intrepid electronic pioneers; i’m thinking of the wonderful cochlea shaking Maryanne Amarcher here.

The opposite of pulses and rhythms is complete freedom from any rules, melodies, structures or repetitions, in a way this
became the dogma of “Free music” in the 60’s and 70’s. Trio Heinz Herbert act like a bridge between free-improvisation and the highly refined sculpting of sonic landscapes that has become the signature of today’s modern electronic music. In a recent 5hr Twitch Q+A Sean Booth from legendary Warp duo Autechre recently confessed that he spent a year listening to nothing but Art Bears records. Perhaps if Autechre were to manifest this influence and swapped their laptops for hardware synths, acoustic drums and electric guitar, they might be making records like Tomorrow Wonderland too.

Luke Fowler.

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