Unfinished Portrait of Youth Today

German experimental electronic musician Hanno Leichtmann constructed the pieces that make up Unfinished Portrait of Youth Today out of brief snippets from his cassette collection, which he processed through a modular synthesizer setup. Each around 90 seconds long, the tracks all capture a moment in time (often syrupy strings or a splash of mallet percussion) and glitch the living daylights out of it. The pieces all have simplistic, one-word titles that couldn't be more to the point; "Sad," "Hope," and "Joy" all express those emotions, "Snow" feels appropriately wintry, and "Flutes" contains the woodwind instrument named in its title. In some ways, the "unfinished" tag is fitting, as you might expect artists like Oval and Fennesz to take these sounds and use them as building blocks for songs, rather than just loop them with minimal effects/processing and present them as miniatures. However, the album's immediacy makes it a thrilling listening experience. The sounds all headbutt into the wall for a minute or so before dropping to the floor, and then another one starts up. The album plays like a gleeful procession of jarred memories, delivering one hypnagogic sugar rush after another. [Originally released on cassette by The Tapeworm in 2013, Karlrecords' 2015 vinyl edition adds six cuts taken from the same sessions.] ~ Paul Simpson