glitterbug

Qvest Magazin reviews Cancerboy… I am flattered and surprised. Thanks!!

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Klingt makaber, aber: Krebsbehandlung und Deep Techno haben gemeinsam, dass sie zu ei- nem weiten Teil vom Experimentellen leben. Man weiß nie genau, wie es ausgeht. »Ich habe
weite Teile meiner Kindheit in Krankenhäusern verbracht, als Reisender durch die seltsame (und zu jener Zeit experimentellen) Welt aus Bestrah- lung und Chemotherapie, im dämmerigen Schwebezustand zwischen Hoffnung und Tod und einer medizinischen Überlebensprognose nahe Null.« Das tranceartige Warten auf eine Erlösung ist auf dem dritten Solo- album vom Kölner Produzenten Till Rohmann alias Glitterbug atmosphä- risch dokumentiert. Das beginnt schrecklich: im Hintergrund nichts als beiläufiges Personal-Gequatsche – im Vordergrund laut vernehmlich das quietschende Atmen des Patienten, aus dessen Atemrhythmus der erste Takt entsteht. Viel bunter wird es dann auch nicht, aber umso eindringli- cher in dem Ambient-Techno-Labyrinth, das bis zum Ende keinen guten Ausgang verspricht. Glitterbugs ganz persönliche Art der Verarbeitung sei- nes Überlebens gerät zur gelungenen musikalischen Autobiografie.

Thanks for the warm words! You can find the original article here.

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Die Geschichte hinter diesem Album ist mit das Intimste, das man an seine Fans weitergeben kann. Der Techno-Produzent Till Rohmann aka Glitterbug ist als Kind dem Tod von der Schippe gesprungen. Er war an Krebs erkrankt und kämpfte lange Jahre dagegen an, bis der Kampf ausgefochten war und Glitterbug endlich beginnen konnte, ein normales Leben zu führen. Bis dahin war es ein langer und beschwerlicher Weg: »Ich habe weite Teile meiner Kindheit in Krankenhäusern verbracht, als Reisender durch die seltsame Welt aus Bestrahlung und Chemotherapie, im dämmerigen Zustand zwischen Hoffnung und Tod, und einer medizinischen Überlebensprognose nahe Null.« Folgerichtig widmet Glitterbug sein neues Album »Cancerboy« in einer selten gesehen Offenheit allen »Cancergirls und Cancerboys da draußen«. Der Inhalt stellt zudem das Beste dar, was er jemals produziert hat. Gerade bei einem Album mit einer so drückenden Thematik wie »Cancerboy« hätte man annehmen können, dass die Kompositionen nachdenklicher klingen und mehr Zeit und Raum einnehmen. Stattdessen sind sie mutiger, komprimierter, fordern den Hörer heraus und ziehen diesen vor allem auf den Dancefloor wie selten zuvor. Schön, wenn man auf so lebensbejahende Weise ein so diffiziles Thema verarbeiten kann – man muss das Leben feiern, so lange man kann.

My dear friends of legendary Aquarius Records in San Francisco about Cancerboy. Thank you so much!!

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The last Glitterbug record showed up in the midst of some sort of electronica renaissance, with fantastic new records from Pantha Du Prince, Actress, Klimek, T++ (sad we haven’t heard anything else from them/him) and a bunch more, so Glitterbug, the work of a German DJ/producer fit perfectly with all of those, the sound lush and layered, softly psychedelic, cosmic with a definitely Pop Ambient vibe. We played that record to death. This record looks to follow suit, but unlike that first one, which was more a full self contained sound world, woven from both studio work and live recordings, this record, Cancerboy, is a much more personal collection, focusing on Glitterbug’s struggle with cancer as a boy (hence the title). The record even starts off with what sounds like the ambient sound of a hospital room, the wheezing and beeping of machines, the voices of doctors and nurses, which gives way to the opening track “To Guess”, which takes some of those sounds and weaves them into a dark, droney stretch of moody electronic melancholia, a hushed rhythmic shuffle, warm shimmery drones, little flecks of glitchery here and there, a super simple kick drum pulse, tinkling chimes, and ethereal melodies, quite haunting and cinematic, and an appropriately somber opening for a record with such a dark focus. But the darkness is not all encompassing, the record slips into more sort of Kompakt style minimal techno on “Abyss”, a grid of pulse and click, wreathed in dark melodic swirls and brooding low end thrum, but as the song progresses, the melodies percolate wildly, the song grows more distorted and the vibe more frantic.
“Undertow” brings it back down, another Kompakt style shuffle, a woozy moody robotic groove, laced with a spidery minor key melody, the beats and loops in constant flux, sometimes sleek and clinical, other times noisy and rough around the edges, the vibe definitely cool and late night, but seemingly always underpinned by a melancholia that infuses the whole record. Much of the record could very well pass for some modern minimal techno, not knowing the background or the source of the title, but the record is rife with tracks that are a bit more moody and brooding, tracks that peel back the skitter and stutter to reveal the darkness underneath, like on “From Here On”, that loops a strange echo drenched hand clap beat, and then drapes it with thick washes of low end rumble and waves of metallic buzz, as well as some delicate chiming melodies, or on “Dragged Along”, which is a hushed sprawl of super spare dubbed out ambience, that skitters amidst vast swirls of barely there sonic shimmer, only coalescing into a proper beat near the end, and even then, wreathed in wistful melodies, or on “Outside My Window”, which is a lush collage of tangled beats and murky swirling melodies and blurred psychedelic textures, that seem to gradually bleed into one another.

Cinsoundz reviews Cancerboy… in a split review with DNTEL!

Glitterbug – Cancerboy / DNTEL – Aimlessness
“Cancerboy” ist mehr als nur ein weiteres Minimal-Techno-Album und inhaltlich nicht gerade ein Leichtgewicht. Der Kölner Produzent Till Rohmann vertont hier mit Genremitteln seine eigene Krankengeschichte. Der in seiner Kindheit krebskranke Künstler vertont mit Reverb-Sounds, minimalistischen Beats. Maschinenklängen und Düstertechno Krankenhausatmosphäre. Inwieweit man sich als Hörer in eine solch persönlich-sinstre Alptraumchronik über fast 80 Minuten hineinfinden kann und möchte, muß jedem Hörer selbst überlassen bleiben. Till Rohmann ist übrigens nicht nur DJ und Produzent, sondern auch Filmkomponist. Play Track 10 “Outside My Window”.
www.glitterbug.de
Dntel aka Jimmy Tamborello war mal als einziger Elektronik-Act auf dem ganz anders getakteten Sub Pop Label zu Hause. Gegenwärtig hat es ihn mit “Aimlessness” auf DJ Kozes Label Pampa Records veschlagen, für das er zunächst ein Album mit Enya(!)-Bearbeitungen in Angriff nahm. Das vorläufige Ergebnis ist auf Tamborellos Webseite zu hören. Wegen der zu erwartenden rechtlichen Schwierigkeiten kann man nicht von einem nahen Release ausgehen. Stattdessen gibt es jetzt – nach immerhin zehn Jahren – wieder ein neues, reguläres Dntel-Album. Indie & Electronica waren die beiden Pole, die Dntel besser als andere Wettbewerber auf träumerische Art zu verbinden vermochte. Mittlerweile wird ähnliches in Tausenden Heimstudios zusammengebastelt, denen Tamborello jedoch eine Portion Tamborello rythmisches Feingefühl voraushatte. Mit Nite Jewel und Baths hat Tamborello sogar zwei Chillwave-Protagonistinnen als Gesangs- und Remix-Gäste auf sein Album eingeladen. The dreamy side of indie-electro.

Super rating for Cancerboy in Vibe Magazin Germany… you can read the article here.

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Glitterbug aka Till Rohmann ist ein begnadeter, wagemutiger und zeitloser Produzent, immun gegen Hypes und saisonale Sub-Genre-Moden. Er spricht eine ganz individuelle musikalische Sprache, die sich nahtlos zwischen Deep Techno und abstrakter, intimer Komposition bewegt, immer emotional, ergreifend und nahezu plastisch visuell. Glitterbug kreiert einzigartige auditive Landschaften, elektroakustische Erlebnisse, gefühlsgeladen, einnehmend und voller Energie. Auf „Cancerboy“, seinem dritten Studioalbum, verschmilzt Glitterbug diesen intensiven musikalischen Ausdruck mit schwerem Inhalt. Entfernte Reverbs und analoge Rauheit gewinnen Präsenz, und zum Vorschein kommt ein abgründiger, intensiver, impliziter Sound: offen, direkt und nah. „Cancerboy“ ist ein Album an der Grenze des Bewusstseins. Anhören! (4,5/5 – moe)

Very nice Italian review in Electronique, an Italian magazine for electronic music. You can also read the article on their website.

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Era il 2009 quando mi imbattei per la prima volta nella musica di Glitterbug, un album che, non fatico ad ammetterlo, riascoltato oggi mostra dei piccoli difetti di gioventù che all’epoca non mi sembrarono così evidenti. Rimango comunque tutt’ora dell’idea che in quel preciso momento il disco fu un grandioso esempio di sperimentazione sulla techno e sull’house music.

L’anno successivo l’uomo nato Till Rohmann tornò con un nuovo lavoro dal titolo Privilege, musica al solito di ottima fattura ma a mio avviso priva della scintilla presente in quel lontano esordio che è stato Supershelter.

Ecco arrivare il terzo album, Cancerboy, sempre per la c-sides, etichetta gestita direttamente da Rohmann, un titolo forte che scopriamo essere autobiografico. Un disco che vuol farci rivivere la dura lotta sostenuta dall’artista in gioventù per debellare il male supremo.

Le armi sono quelle a lui più congeniali, un mix di techno, house ed ambient lavorate con quella sua innata predisposizione alla sperimentazione. Questa volta è tornato a far centro, con un album intenso ed in alcuni tratti decisamente destabilizzante.

I primi nove minuti fraseggiano nel buio, nella malattia, con i campioni presi da strumentazioni mediche a far da sfondo ad un illustrazione sofferente e malinconica. Un segmento commovente che riesce ad unire magicamente il pianoforte, le percussioni ed i vari campionamenti in una sorta di ricordo vissuto in prima persona che lascia senza fiato.

Dopo questa bellissima partenza esplode un mood techno che ci porteremo avanti per diverso tempo, una techno maggiormente orientati su canoni di nuova Europa, con un andamento deep, un buon groove ed una perfetta gestione degli eventi. No, non c’è la carne e la rabbia, quella manca a tutta la techno odierna, c’è un lavoro di cesello, una progettazione arguta e mirata. Ma non è qui la magia dell’album. Che per quanto mi riguarda, dopo l’apertura, potrebbe tranquillamente riprendere nel sesto brano “Those Hopeful Moments”. Dove ad interessare è una dinamica ritmica jazzata che dona libertà all’intera composizione e proietta l’album verso standard decisamente più alti.

Tutta l’ultima sezione è infatti predominata da sonorità ambient di grandissima qualità ed ognuno dei brani presenti in questo grande finale libera classe in ogni direzione.
“From Here On” tiene alta la tensione con il suo stridore metallico, “Dragged Along” è la notte che viene ad allietare il riposo, “Outside My Window” un risveglio frizzante con bollicine minerali a punzecchiare anima e corpo, “We’ll Still Be Here Tomorrow” è il ritmo sotterraneo, l’ascolto liberatorio, la fine del male.

Non sottovalutatelo perché è un grande album!

Author: Ivo D’Antoni

Textura, the wonderful music platform from Canada, wrote a very nice and in-depth review about Cancerboy. You can read it here.

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Glitterbug: Cancerboy
c.sides

More than a simple set of dancefloor tracks, Glitterbug’s third studio album Cancerboy instead re-configures Till Rohmann’s childhood struggle with cancer into long-form musical form. As he states in the liner notes, he spent much of his childhood in hospitals, undergoing radiation and chemotherapy, and gradually developed a need to address the topic in his music; in fact, so strong is his identification with the experience that he refers to himself in said notes as ‘Cancerboy aka Glitterbug.’ Clearly such an experience would profoundly shape anyone, especially when it occurred at such a young age and when the threat of death loomed as a very real possibility. And so we have Cancerboy, an album, in Rohmann’s words, “about cancer, bitter struggles, desperation, hope, anger, sickness, and at the same time, a fervent love and deep appreciation of life.”

The personalized character of the project is made clear from the outset when “Backwards / To Guess” opens with hospital-related sounds such as the murmuring voices of hospital staff and the gentle wheeze of a patient’s respirator. The focus shifts thereafter to more fundamentally musical content, with many of the eleven tracks presented in a kind of deep, ambient art-techno style where a sense of dancefloor urgency is present even when the tracks hew to a generally cool temperature. The Glitterbug style, at least as documented on this recording, is relatively uncluttered and atmospheric, and heavily focused on drive. Techno, house, dub, and even acid are reference points, rhythmically speaking, though often subtly and sometimes indirectly. Characteristic of the album are hot-wired, propulsive tracks like “Undertow” and “Passages” that Glitterbug powers with insistent synth figures, skipping rhythms, and claps. Rohmann isn’t afraid to let the material unfold at its own pace either, with six of the eleven tracks pushing past the eight-minute mark. Building slowly, they often grow in force, such that a shape-shifter like “Don’t Stop” opens in dub-techno mode before blossoming into a club raver, while the atmospheric techno of “Outside My Window” likewise swells in intensity and scope throughout its seven-minute run.

Admittedly, there are dark moments: a claustrophobic, industrial-styled ambiance permeates the opening minutes of “From Here On,” but rather than the gloom lifting, the mood becomes ever more oppressive when electrical buzzing and clangorous sounds dominate the aural space. It’s important to note, however, that the material, while heavily weighted with autobiographical concern, is not solely despairing in tone. Instead, affirmation, hope, and determination inflame a number of tracks (their titles, too, as illustrated by the set-closer “We’ll Still Be Here Tomorrow”), and as such, while Rohmann might stare into the “Abyss,” that doesn’t mean he plummets into it. Cancerboy is a survivor’s tale, in other words, a story about resilience, not defeat. For the listener, the project benefits greatly from the conceptual underpinning in that it unifes the tracks under a common theme. For Rohmann, it serves, one presumes, an even greater purpose in providing some degree of catharsis for the arduous experiences he’s had to endure as a cancer victim.

June 2012

Thanks dear people of RadioSpin! You can read the original post here.

Cancerboy, the latest album by German producer Till Rohmann a.k.a. Glitterbug is an outstanding concept album, not only because of the sounds you hear, but also because of what lies beneath. It’s the story of Till himself: starting off with oppressive initial hospital scenes, the album slowly builds up then unwinds again and takes us on an emotional journey on the fine line between hope and fear and power and powerlessness. Yet there’s a translucent lightness to it that runs through the entire record with us, at times calm and self-assured, at times almost out of breath. Cancerboy reinforces the outstanding position that Glitterbug has taken in the German music landscape with his compositions of deep timeless electronic sounds, without having to be forceful.