Joseph Suchy ““ (2003)

“Joseph Suchy’s universe is a strange one, and it is in constant mutation. ‘’ sees Suchy producing strangely alluring psychedelic music. (…) With its odd patchworks, backward notes, and melancholy acoustic guitar motifs, the album has claimed an island between the new American psychedelia and German experimental electronica. (…) When the waters subside, they leave an acoustic guitar tune shimmering on the sun-dried sand. And after a few minutes the waters move in again, the guitar is submerged by the electronics, the thick richness of the currents washing away all folky sand castles, only to leave another tune on the shore. (…) Suchy is a wonderful guitar-picker and a daring sound artist. Highly recommended.” (François Couture, All Music Guide) “Not a rocker. Not an electronic artist. A sensual, a feeling person. No copy-art. In these times of senseless struggles for sovereignty at the musicians’ regular table, Suchy is the cowboy with the Indian’s face.“ This is what one of Germany’s biggest daily newspapers recently wrote about Joseph Suchy, “Cologne’s very own professor of guitar research“. They got it spot on. ““ is Suchy’s solo-outing. It’s a music of delicate sounds, in which acoustic guitars and electro-acoustic signals are woven into non-linear, fragile sound sculptures. At times, this music borders on sensory deception (what is this sound? Electric or acoustic?); it is an illustrated broadsheet of a strange, yet familiar reality. Suchy cunningly and imperturbably evades the categorisations of contemporary modern music: What he does is giving his listeners a carte blanche to dream. Or, as the artist himself puts it: “Music in search of the freakwave“. “Suchy makes psychedelia for the digital age, a remarkably streamlined combination of hypnotic, half-improvised guitar lines and an equally absorbing array of electronic sounds. (…)’Ka-asam’, the disc’s most raucously psychedelic track, arrives through a background of weightless drones, floating in on choppy waveforms like transmissions of a distant satellite. (…) I’ve always thought it a mystery why Suchy is so rarely grouped among other electronic or experimental artists using guitars, like Fennesz or Christopher Willits. Though with each new release, Suchy gives me the easy answer: he operates on a completely elevated plain. The production value and nuance of this record places it on par with any from the aforementioned musicians, but the complexity of Suchy’s arrangements, the emotional and illusionist distance covered by each track, remains unmatched.” (Brainwashed)