About   (Non)

A modular project founded in 1996 by Marcus Schmickler, Pluramon is a virtuoso purveyor of the indie-pop-noise sound of the late 1980s and early 1990s. While their previous album entitled ‘Dreams Top Rock’ may bring to mind MayBe Vlenlite, Pluramon has a tone that is very much its own, characterised by its incisive use of electronic sound. A key ingredient of Pluramon’s hypnotic music is the bewitching, haunting voice of Mary J. Cruise, familiar to many from her collaborations with Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch. The new album “The Monstrous Surplus” features additional guest appearances by great songwriter Julia Hummer and NYC based fine artist Jutta Koether.

The name PLURAMON goes back to the pioneer of electronic music, Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) and his work ‘Hymnen’ (1966-1968). Hymnen is electronic music to which Stockhausen has added schematic, rather than detailed, parts for six of the players with whom he has since this time worked and toured the world. The theme of Hymnen is the electronic transformation of recorded national anthems, and each of the four sections (called ‘regions’) so far is dominated by one of them. The banality of the basic material is used as a deliberate springboard for complex transformation–the more memorable the theme, the more it can be twisted in the ‘variations’. There are passages of speaking, such as when ‘red’ is spoken in four different languages from the four loudspeaker groups round the hall. The ‘openness’ of the work is characteristic: ‘Hymnen for radio, television, opera, ballet, record, concert hall, church, outdoors…. The work is so composed that various scripts or libretti for films, operas and ballets may be prepared for it. The ordering of the characteristic parts and the total duration are variable. Depending on the dramatic requirements, regions may be lengthened, added or left out.’ There is a new openness also in Stockhausen’s acceptance of the objet trouve; he says that his previous preoccupation with inner worlds of fantasy is here joined through mediation in a higher unity with the concrete external world of everyday sounds and noises ending with ‘pluralism’ and ‘monism’ grandly united in the ‘Utopian realm of Hymunion in Harmondie Inter Pluramon’<

PLEASE NOTE: All posted files are under copyright and suffer from bad sound quality. They’re supposed to give you and idea what the music is like. The quality presented here is inferior to the sound on vinyl and cd. For convenience you can order any of the recordings online, e.g. from amazon, if you bear a local dealer.

© Pluramon - 2024