from THE WIRE, December 2002

>>essen.momente returns Michael Rüsenberg to his place of birth with a triad of pieces exploring the contours of industrial Essen, reworking field recordings with overdubbed sounds ofelectrical and digital processing. The first track travels via tram and autobahn through the main train terminal before ending with a Hadean descent through the lift shaft of the RWE tower. Though Rüsenberg claims one train stop to be the most deafening in Germany, the piece is not so aggressively noise oriented as you´d think given such statistic. It´s more an exploration of streamlined non-entity: electric doors humming and gasping; low level rumbles with patches of near silence; and a simple see-saw synth chord.
>>Panzerlaufen. für Wolfsbank, built from archived recordings of the city´s collieries, loops its sources into reverberant drones. Predominant sifting and tapping sounds alternate with boomier
bursts of industrial noise.
The final
>>Baldeney, an *acoustic daydream* recorded at a hydro-electric power station, provided the soundtrack for a dance work. It´s the most absorbing and varied composition here, freeing sounds from their city associations, moving through a series of shadowy sonic meditations towards near symphonic drones and the brilliant winding down whine of a spinning machine cycle.

Matt Ffytche