"Hans Reichel comes out of the tradition of Harry Partch, in as much as both men were unwilling to settle for what tradition handed them. Partch, who invented or modified an orchestra's worth of instruments to get the sounds he wanted, once called himself a "Philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry." If you learned of Reichel through the obituaries written after he died in 2011, you might think he was a graphic designer with a sideline in making wood sing like a badger. It's true that he made his crust throughout his life working as a typesetter and designer and that he invented an instrument called the daxophone. The daxophone was fashioned from amplified tongues of wood that were bowed to obtain a wide variety of sounds, including some rather like a badger's voice.

But when Reichel first started recording for FMP (Free Music Production) in the 1970s, he was a guitarist, albeit one who sounded like no one else around. Reichel's early discography became scarce after FMP sold off its vinyl stock in the 1992. It has taken until 2017 for his two earliest LPs, Wichlinghauser Blues and Bonobo, to make it to CD; you can also purchase them as downloads from the Destination: Out blog. Heard now, they reveal Reichel to be an example or fellow traveller than an influence. His easy shifts between interval-hopping and voluptuous note-warping recalls the blues-to-improv-to-exotica leaps of Mike Cooper. He doesn't sound much like Paul Metzger or Greg Malcolm, but like them he felt free to modify his instrument to get new sounds, such as the wobbly notes, alien tonalities and bursts of frenetic activity on "Wenn Das Rohr Dommelt," the first track on Wichlinghauser Blues. Heard blind, you might think that the tracks was from a recent LP by harpist Rhodri Davies rather than any guitarist.

Bonobo has a cartoon on the back of the sleeve that illustrates how Reichel made the instrument heard on that record; he removed the necks from a couple guitars and mounted them on a platform. The first record has another instrument that Reichel modified so that it had eleven strings and three pick-ups. These changes weren't for novelty's sake, but to allow him to find notes between the notes one usually plays, or to draw sounds hidden in a guitar's guts, rather like Sonic Youth would do in the 1980s when they jammed screwdrivers into guitar necks and turned them up really loud.

Wichlinghauser Blues is the rawer of the two. Half of it was recorded at home, but even the studio tracks have an in-the-red quality that amplifies the Hawaiian hangover quality of Reichel's music. Other tracks reveal an instrumental conception that, if you can ignore the tones, has a polyphonic quality more like that of a pianist than a guitarist. Bonobo's cleaner recording highlights the fluidity of Reichel's playing, and also his eccentric but unerring phrasing. In this respect, his graphic work made common cause with his playing; after his death, one fellow graphic artist recalled receiving impassioned 4 AM emails about kerning details. Bonobo also reveals Reichel's expressiveness side. For all their alien clangor and bracing sourness, "Moor" and "Des Jagers Klage" give vent to a universal bereftness. Reichel didn't hack up his guitars just to make them sound strange; he did what he had to do in order to get them to say what he needed to say."-Bill Meyer, Dusted Magazine

This album has been reviewed on our magazine:


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