(((O))) : Bohren & Der Club of Gore – Piano Nights

It’s 2:15 A.M and wherever you are it is quiet. Everyone in your household is asleep or you are commuting home in the nighttime stillness. The air is cool and crisp, it may be raining or foggy and time seems to be standing still pushing you into thoughtful pensiveness. Whether your musings are nostalgic, sad, happy or fill you with perfectly normal existential anxiety doesn’t matter. In this moment there is no other music like Bohren & Der Club Of Gore to provide the soundtrack for your thoughts. Piano Nights is magnificent and deeply introspective work that makes a superb addition to their already impressive catalog.

Bohren & Der Club Of Gore is often cited as playing “black ambient jazz” or “doom jazz” and these descriptors are relatively accurate if only because their really isn’t anything else out there like them. On Piano Nights Bohren & Der Club Of Gore’s progression is just as glacial as their well known slow tempos. If you’re familiar with them there won’t be many surprises except possibly the return of the guitar in the final song, the first time it’s been heard on a Bohren record since 1995. What they have done here is perfect their formula giving Piano Nights even more depth and haunting emotiveness. It is a soft, deliberate and noir-esque journey inward.

Throughout their career Bohren & Der Club Of Gore have employed dramatic use space, anchored by understated and incredibly restrained drumming. The space on Piano Nights is draped in softly echoing ambience that creates an expansive landscape for the various keyboards and bass to stretch out between each chord and note. The sweeping openness gives each note heft and weight. Every downbeat drops like a sigh of relief. All of this subdued weight supports the soaring, mournful saxophone. The effect seems simple at first but the sheer mass and depth of the music reveal a complexity born out of patient and careful composing. No note goes to waste and no bit of quiet is completely empty.

It’s been said that listening to Bohren & Der Club Of Gore requires a great deal of patience. I disagree with this sentiment. I think listening to Piano Nights requires mental stillness more than anything. The band has already done the hard work of instilling their music with all of the patience required, all you need to do is sit back and let it carry you. The band describes their own music as “uneventful” and “sailing without sails.” This is only true if the listener had an uneventful life that wasn’t worth the reflection that Piano Nights will draw them into. It is the perfect example of heavy music played as softly as breath.