PHAZZ-A-DELIC | Phazz-a-delic New Format Recordings

De-Phazz „Pit Sounds“

Writing about the significance of De-Phazz for upscale electronic entertainment music since the turn of the millennium would be like carrying surfboards to California. After all, anyone who has held a cocktail in a lounge in Berlin, Miami or Ibiza since 1997 knows the band from Heidelberg – be it because of hits such as “The Mambo Craze” or “No Jive” (now played over 11 million times on Spotify), be it from films, commercials and television or because of one of the countless concerts the band has given worldwide over the past quarter of a century.

What is less well known, however, is who is the main conceptualist behind Germany’s most important electro-organic music export. That is about to change. Because with “Pit Sounds”, Pit Baumgartner, the gifted collage artist, sample juggler and sound designer from De-Phazz, is now presenting his magnum opus. Even if it is, of course, an expression of pure self-irony, the album stands up very well to the tongue-in-cheek comparison with the Beach Boys classic “Pet Sounds”. Because in its very own way, “Pit Sounds” is also a masterpiece, and in its original meaning – as craftsmanship driven to perfection. “There’s this saying by Matthew Herbert, who says that he made every note on his album himself,” Baumgartner quotes a famous British producer colleague, ”whereas in my case, not a note is mine!”

Peter with the scissor hands, as Mr. De-Phazz presents himself in the black and white photo collage on the back cover of “Pit Sounds”, describes his way of working pretty well. Like a miner, Baumgartner goes into the huge tunnel system of his almost infinite sound collection of old soul, economic miracle sounds and obscure song finds from all over the world and digs for acoustic precious metal. When he has found a piece of gold, he carefully breaks it out of its original context, mills, hammers, turns and polishes it until he finally brings it into an unexpected new context with a sly smile. “I’m best at putting things together that don’t belong together. And I enjoy doing so, sometimes successfully, sometimes totally wrong,” says the trained mechanic and proven Dadaism advocate. Accordingly, ‘Pit Sounds’ is full of bizarre sonic chance encounters, which then turn out to be sincere love stories with plenty of offbeat humour. Here, the familiar 60s choirs meet classy jazz guitar licks, syrupy retro strings à la Bert Kaempfert, singing cowboys, Latin American standard dances, multilingual language snippets and even football trumpets. And yet it sounds as if all of this has always formed a natural unity. It could hardly be more sustainable: Baumgartner gives a new lease of life to worn-out or carelessly discarded sounds, upcycling them for the ears, so to speak. Listening to it creates a feeling of deep relaxation, reminiscent of Harald Juhnke’s famous definition of happiness: ‘No appointments and easy to sit down.’

If you like, ‘Pit Sounds’, which occasionally features musicians present in the studio such as trumpeter Joo Kraus or soprano Constanze Backes, is something like a sonic biography of Baumgartner. Music like this can only come from someone who made his way into the pop business in a somewhat unorthodox way: someone who, thanks to the GIs present in Heidelberg, developed a penchant for un-German funky grooves early on, worked as a clown and a DJ, produced radio plays for Ikea or ‘Die Sendung mit der Maus’ and has always retained his inner ‘somersaulting child’, as he calls it, even in his work as a remixer for Kool & the Gang, Kurtis Blow or Ennio Morricone.
Incidentally, the fact that ‘Pit Sounds’ ends with an insanely reworked version of a piece by classical composer John Dowland is a perfect fit. As the album shows, the ingenious master tailor Pit Baumgartner must now be considered a classic himself.