"6-track EP from the German experimental dark folk duo Brannten Schnüre. A shimmering, pastoral collage of acoustic instrumentation, electronics, field recordings and haunting, austere vocals, the songs on ‘Ei, Wir Tun Dir Nicths Zuleide!’ comes together to something quite astonishing and otherwordly. Luboš Fišer’s soundtrack to Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders comes to mind, as does the essence of Astrid Lindgren’s summer scenes with fragments of the ambience of something akin to Nico’s Desertshore.

"When the tragic story between two knights of the Teutonic Order unfolds in František Vláčil's "Valley of the Bees" – a stone-cold classic of the Czechoslovak new wave cinema – the spiritual and the material world fall into harsh ideologic conflict with each other, disrupting the peace and quietude of a Bohemian village of the 13th century. The titular bees don't have much of a say in the action here but their unremitting work and community and their unswerving presence form a strong symbolic backdrop of cosmic harmony against the life of the villagers falling apart with bloodshed and murder and religious bigotry. Throughout nearly all occidental and oriental mythologies and traditions the bees have been attributed with exactly these world-healing, harmonious qualities, connecting the spiritual with the physical realm, repeating the act of divine creation in miniature form. Poets like Ernst Jünger and Maurice Maeterlinck always had a profound sense of this and described the sensual nature of pollination as a wondrous trace of the cosmogonic eros running through the elemental world. Maeterlinck's thoughts on bees are being recited in another cult classic of European cinema, Víctor Erice's "Spirit of the Beehive", a hauntingly magickal coming of age tale in which the harmonious order of the bees is completely lost on a human world that has become morally out of joint, with chaotic concepts of good and evil stirring and confounding the imagination of the young protagonist. All of these literary and cinematic influences have fed heavily into the extended microcosm of Brannten Schnüre, culminating in one of the most outstanding pieces of their fabulous discography. It is little wonder then that "Ei, Wir Tun Dir Nichts Zuleide!" was first conceived as a full-length album, but even though the final product runs for merely 14 minutes the record brims over with a plethora of references, citations and musical ideas, hinting at a whole secret world hiding behind its rather modest appearance. First issued on Gothenburg-based cult label I Dischi del Barone in 2020 in a limited run of 200 copies that, like all Brannten Schnüre releases, flew off the shelves within the blink of an eye, this beautiful 7-inch now gets a much deserved and re-mastered second run on Schoppik's own imprint Quirlschlängle. The six songs on "Ei, Wir Tun Dir Nichts Zuleide!" see Brannten Schnüre probably at their most down-stripped folkloristic, touching on both the disarming naivety of the German Volkslied of the 19th century Romantic tradition and the sternness of medieval spiritual songs. But there is also a nod towards the hypnotic repetitions of 70ies/80ies minimal music rolling through the drone-saturated loops and almost meditative incantations. If much of this sounds mournful at first, elegiac even, it must be read on the background of an eco-system that is now direly endangered and always on the brink of disappearance. All elegies aside though, there is a light-heartedness and optimism at play here that is otherwise rarely heard in the music of Brannten Schnüre, culminating in the short and uplifting closing tune „Verkündigung“, reassuring like the humming of the bees itself, that there is meaning in the things happening around us and that, despite all the tragedy and the bloodshed, this earth is a beautiful place." - Margot Benetti"

Quirlschlängle, 2024