♫♪  Shampoo Boy - “Still”

Apparently, it’s just not enough for Peter Rehberg to take all of our money through his continued dedication to releasing excellent music on his ubiquitous Editions Mego. No, now Rehberg has to go releasing his own stellar compositions on other labels like Blackest Ever Black as well.

The band in question is the excellently named Shampoo Boy, a new Rehberg project featuring guitarist Christian Schachinger and bassist Christina Nemec. Unsurprisingly, the music these three are churning out is awesome, but Shampoo Boy finds Rehberg exploring some seemingly new territory as a composer. This is not the brutal glitch-oriented Rehberg of Pita and Fenn O’Berg nor the doom-laden Rehberg of KTL. Instead, there’s a surprising sense of restraint in some of Shampoo Boy’s works.

Take the track “Still,” for instance, where the trio create a gorgeous, near-homogeneous texture with their instruments. Electronics churn away, guitars click, and the bass pops, but after a while, these individual textures become less and less distinct, turning into a singular sonority. However, despite its novelty of timbre, “Still” subtly takes the ideas present in Rehberg’s ongoing projects with Fenn O’Berg and KTL and places them within a new context. Like Fenn O’Berg, “Still” similarly blurs the parts of its whole into a uniform soundworld, but instead of moving erratically from one texture to the next, the track revels in stasis like a KTL piece. Even though Rehberg may be playing with similar forms from his past work, he’s never done it in such a refined and indirect way.

Shampoo Boy’s album Licht is out in late May via Blackest Ever Black. You can stream the track “Still” below.

• Blackest Ever Black: http://www.blackesteverblack.bigcartel.com

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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