“What sets Tanz Mein Herz slightly apart, is the deep well of French folk traditions from which the ensemble draws, elegantly distilled and reformed into a vibrantly contemporary and experimental body of sound.”
Tanz Mein Herz’s latest, Quattro, out via Standard In-Fi, encounters the French collective pushing at the boundaries of folk tinged experimentalism, psych, and drone. Sprawling across 2 LPs, it’s an absolute burner of throbbing, hypnotic sound and stunning creative interplay, and easily one of the best records we’ve heard in the early months of 2021.
Over the course of the last decade, Standard In-Fi has taken on the task of illuminating some of the most exciting currents of underground music in France. With a carefully curated catalog, specializing in material from across a vast range of fields - drone, field recordings, traditional, experimental, and rock - they’ve quickly risen as a label to watch. Running like a thread through Standard In-Fi’s output is Tanz Mein Herz.
Since their debut LP, Territory, issued by Standard In-Fi back in 2015, the French ensemble, Tanz Mein Herz, has delivered a handful of mind-bending recordings that position them - alongside contemporaries like 75 Dollar Bill, Natural Information Society, Al Doum & The Faryds, Pancrace, and others - at the forefront of a translational movement of artists, embracing cultural hybridity and collective interplay in order to create new, trance inducing forms of sonority. What sets Tanz Mein Herz slightly apart, is the deep well of French folk traditions from which the ensemble draws, elegantly distilled and reformed into a vibrantly contemporary and experimental body of sound.
Quattro is Tanz Mein Herz’s 4th full length LP and encounters their line up at its most expanded to date, including the contributions of Guilhem Lacroux, Alexis Degrenier, Mathieu Tilly, Pierre Bujeau, Pierre-Vincent Fortunier, Ernest Bergez and Jeremie Sauvage. Capturing the band playing a vast range of acoustic instruments at Gamounet during 2016, the album traces through passages of deep, immersive long tones and drone, repetitive jams that nod toward Tony Conrad’s iconic collaborations with Faust and Terry Riley’s 1970s outings with John Cale, heavy stoner jams, and full-on atonal experimentalism, working as seamlessly in its discrete passages as it does as a collective whole.
If there were any doubts before, Quattro easily positions Tanz Mein Herz as one of the most exciting bands working today. A truly stunning body of work that’s impossible to get off the turntable once the needle drops.
Originally published by Soundohm.