Christian Naujoks' practice is characterised by a critical melancholy, a perspective through which he scrutinises past artistic and musical possibilities without the crutch of academic pretence. This reflexive approach brings about its very own fragile and humorously wistful beauty, rousing a referential sonic world-building that stays geared toward the here and now. Principally a composer, he creates work in various media, often informed by the serial and cyclical form of diverse strands of minimal music and the extension of (post-)conceptual art procedures to the production and organisation of sound. Feigning both naivety and virtuosity, Naujoks camouflages one as the other while effortlessly dressing up art as pop and vice versa.

Soft Mouth Data Service is an ongoing project of concerts and installations that begun last summer at Galerie Max Mayer. The series' compositional strategy playfully relies on a method considered to be an early fixture in the toolbox of institutional critique: the survey. In advance of his Düsseldorf presentation Naujoks invited the audience to fill out an online questionnaire, with each participant’s input data purportedly forming the basis of a number of tailored scores that were then rendered in graphic notation and performed on three evenings over the course of the exhibition. The input/output operations of this aleatoric framework are formally and metaphorically crystallised in the accompanying Mouth Pieces, embouchures of brass instruments turned readymade sculpture, embedded in the raw pumice block walls of the gallery as depicted on the LP's cover.

Recorded live on-site at Schmela Haus, the eleven tracks that make up his new album range from electronic ambient music, abstract beats and microtonal guitar excursions to idiosyncratic takes on a Julius Eastman ensemble piece and Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill. On Aberrant Joan, Naujoks combines glitched string orchestration with melodic synth-flutes, re-entering a tonal space first explored in his collaboration with the artist Ei Arakawa for the 2017 edition of Skulptur Projekte Münster. The wafting bass line shared by No Rave and Ambient Rave, a diptych of songs facing each other on the A and B side, reverberates from early 90s dance floors and takes the music to a darkly clubby dimension, while Cosmic Stringz conjures the high points of the record’s mercurially romantic predecessor Wave (Dial, 2016), praised by critic Philip Sherburne as 'the most exquisitely melancholy thing he's done yet'. Following the camp silliness of Self-Castration In Ur Sleep, the album's closer, Tearz, a duet of piano and drum sampler, leaves the listener floating further away from emotional gravity, towards a distant planet of trip hoppy ethereality.

Text: Moritz Nebenführ

Tracklist:

01 Melenkeyz

02 Aberrant Joan

03 No Rave

04 Cosmic Stringz

05 Soft Cover

06 Service Industry

07 Woman Ascending The Stairs

08 Ambient Rave

09 Insomnia

10 Self-Castration In Ur Sleep

11 Tearz