(2020) Jochen Tiberius Koch - Astoria


Review:
Jochen Tiberius Koch isn’t shy about tackling grand concepts for album projects. Walden, his 2018 debut, drew for inspiration from no less than Henry David Thoreau’s seminal text, and now the German composer’s equally ambitious second, Astoria, builds itself around the history of a hotel built in 1915 at Leipzig, Germany that suffered damage during wartime but then recovered to regain its status as one of the country’s most beautiful buildings. Certainly one could do a whole lot worse than use a hotel as an album foundation, given the limitless range of stories one could imagine generating from it. Boasting 200 rooms and a dance cafe, lounges, and restaurants, the hotel was clearly no modest construction; a December 1943 air raid, however, destroyed much of it and necessitated the complete rebuild of two wings. During the last part of the century, improvements were again made to reestablish the hotel as one of the country’s most luxurious until, that is, its 1996 closure, leaving it now, apparently, empty. Even that brief account suggests parallels can be proposed to German history, with the events of WWII and the felling of the Berlin Wall pivotal parts of the story. As dramatic and wide-ranging as the album’s historical dimension is the musical approach Koch devised for it. Framed with a “Prolog” and “Epilog,” Astoria is a twelve-part concept album that includes orchestral passages (Knut Masur conducting The Schmalkalden Philharmony), electronica elements, spoken word (by Rainer C. Herzmann, Manfred Kroog, and Gunnar Skrocki), and even neo-pop (sung by Minna and Fräulein Laura). Listeners of a certain age might find themselves recalling a bombastic release such as Rick Wakeman’s Journey to the Center of the Earth as a precursor of sorts, the ‘70s an era notorious for concept albums of that kind. Though there is some degree of bombast to Astoria, it’s not nearly as overblown as some of its over-the-top forerunners. “Prolog” introduces the project with delicate acoustic piano playing and a dramatic voiceover (in German) by Herzmann setting a serious tone. An instrumental follows, the methodical pounding rhythms of “Uplifting Monument” consistent with the idea of hotel construction. With a delivery even deeper than Herzmann’s, Kroog takes his turn as the speaker in the uplifting “Sunrising,” after which the album makes a sharp left turn in “Behind the Backdrop.” Beginning with singing by Minna, the song moves from a vocal pop intro to beat-based electronica; she also appears in two other songs, her voice delicate in the melancholy orchestral setting “The Ballare” and impassioned for the sombre “33/45,” a grandiose production that follows tolling bells and wailing sirens with a climactic build of strings, piano, and vocals (a spoken passage too, this one in German by Astrid Hoeschel-Bellmann). Hardly outdone, Laura takes a memorable turn on “Epilog,” the clear enunciation of her English lyrics, like Minna’s, a counterweight to the German spoken elsewhere. In reflecting the hotel’s demise and eventual shuttering, “Decline” and “Lost Place” paint suitably elegiac pictures in arrangements rich in strings and piano, even if the latter eventually builds in power, the gesture perhaps designed to suggest another potential rise from the ashes for the hotel. Enhancing the release is a sixteen-page booklet that accompanies each song title with a drawing, the gesture helpful in stitching the parts into a coherent narrative whole. However much the tracks featuring voices add to the release’s impact, it’s thoughtfully crafted and attractively arranged instrumentals like “The Lobby Boys,” “After the War,” and “Uplifting Monument” that best argue in Koch’s favour as a composer worthy of attention. In such cases, his handling of the plentiful instrumental resources at hand—drums, piano, strings, etc.—impresses, as does his ability to create material marked by contrasts in dynamics and density.





Tracklist:
01 - PROLOG
02 - UPLIFTING MONUMENT
03 - SUNRISING
04 - BEHIND THE BACKDROP
05 - THE BALLARE
06 - THE LOBBY BOYS
07 - 33_45
08 - AFTER THE WAR
09 - ANOTHER WORLD
10 - DECLINE
11 - LOST PLACE
12 - EPILOG


Media Report:
Genre: chamber pop, indie-pop
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits