Sascha Ring has never been a simple electronic producer. Under the moniker Apparat he has built a hybrid laboratory over the years, where writing, orchestration and digital manipulation coexist without hierarchies.
“A Hum Of Maybe”, the sixth chapter after “LP5” in 2019, arrives at the end of a declared creative fracture, a period of aphasia that damaged his relationship with music. It's not a biographical detail. It is the disk matrix.
The cover openly quotes MC Escher and the suggestion is not ornamental. Escher built spaces where logic twists until it betrays the eye. Apparat applies the same principle to sound. He layers electronic patterns, exposes them to sudden melodic expansions, then recompacts them into minimal rhythmic cells. The architecture is clear, the perception unstable.
The album was born from an almost ascetic exercise: one idea a day, without filter, without perfectionism. From the sedimentation of sketches and fragments, eleven traces emerged that maintain traces of that urgency. The writing is perceived as less smooth than in the past, more exposed, sometimes irregular. It's a calculated risk that avoids complacency.
The lyrical theme on which the album is built is love, but removed from its more worn iconography. Love for oneself, for one's partner, for one's daughter. Love as an unstable territory that requires continuous recalibration. The title “A Hum Of Maybe” alludes to an in-between state. Not affirmation, not denial. A buzz. An underground current where analogue and digital, binary impulse and organic vibration coexist. Ring works on this threshold, and the album finds coherence precisely in the ambiguity.
The opening track of the album Glimmerine translates fatherhood into musical form. A feverish trombone crosses the electronic fabric, the synths sparkle without indulging in emphasis, the dynamics oscillates between density and rarefaction. There is no domestic rhetoric, rather a sense of sonic responsibility. Love here is not a declaration, it is internal pressure that modifies the arrangement. An almost curatorial journey that crosses the eleven tracks. A journey like the sensation conveyed by the title track Hum Of Maybe where the drums punctuate the succession of the panorama.
The presence of historical collaborators consolidates an almost chamber-like dimension. Philipp Johann Thimm, Christoph Hamann, Jörg Wähner and Christian Kohlhaas contribute to a band dynamic that warms up the electronic system without distorting it. KÁRYYN's interventions in “Tilth” and Jan-Philipp Lorenz in “Pieces, Falling” broaden the timbral spectrum without transforming the album into a showcase of featuring.
“A Hum Of Maybe” is a meticulous work, at times even cerebral. It doesn't allow for immediately memorable songs or spectacular peaks. He prefers to build a coherent landscape, where every detail has a structural function. The fusion between composer sensitivity and producer discipline remains his distinctive trait.
It's not a record that reinvents Apparat. It's a record that puts him to the test. Ring gives sound to instability with an electronic method, accepts limbo as a creative condition and derives a compact work from it, less seductive than others, but more aware. For those looking for adult writing in electronics, not simple sound design.
SCORE: 8.00
TO LISTEN NOW
Glimmerine – Tilth – w/ KÁRYYN –
TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY
Nothing!
