Enders Room - Random Guru

Everything flows. Lots goes. And nevertheless only a little runs. So we humans search. For experience, fulfillment, enlightenment. And ask ourselves question after question. Johannes Enders is well aware that the answers are often in the details. “You can find your guru in lots of small things,” replies the forty-year-old giant, a self-described “searcher for meaning,” when asked about the title of his fourth Enders Room album: Random Guru.

“After all, globalization is taking place on a spiritual level as well. And in times of omnipresent hype, you just have to wake up and start to appreciate things that superficially seem small. Watching a frog catch a fly is much more fun for me than trying the latest coffee blend in one of the many cities that have been forced into conformity.” It is clear that, for all their love of detail, the eloquent musician and his analogous electronic ensemble are concerned to offer a critique in sound. But: “This album is above all a matter of stocking stock, an indicator,” he says. “Since such a production is always a process of suffering as well, I definitely did not want to make a record that just complains. Enders Room was always wide open to the future. And versatile. I just happen to be the kind of guy who can quickly change his mind.”

In the instrument and equipment den of “Enders room” in Weilheim, this family man – who has recently recorded an album of church music, with Nils-Petter Molvaer, among others, who just did another tour of the United States with Billy Hart, and who is taking over a professorship in Leipzig in October – has also created this new miracle in sound. Working alone every night or together with musician friends such as the sensational Ghanian singer Joy Frempong, the trumpeter and flügelhorn player Micha Acher from the Notwist and his brother Markus Acher on percussion, the prizewinning composer of film music Gerd Baumann on guitar, or Flip Philipp on vibraphone, with John Hollenbeck or Bastian Jütte on percussion and Roberto Di Gioia at the piano. What happens in Enders Room is difficult to grasp stylistically and musically unimaginable in any case. In its unique way, it touches on indie rock and old school hip-hop, jazz, church music, pop, punk, and Kraftwerk but always remains impeccably impressive and as original as it is expressive. No matter whether the words are choppy in the somber “Ana Vrin,” which is Nirvana spelled backward, or in the floatingly elegiac “Sister Peace.” Whether the team is barking at the enchanting “Full Moon at Noon” in all its choral splendor, or whether they are calling on us to wake up in the wonderful pop ballad “This Is Your Day” or sounding like a mixture of Bird, the Animals, and Moondog in the dramatic dance monster “The Age of the Locusts.” It always happens in a musical preview, in the successful experiment, more faithful to the details and authentic than anything else.

The grooves are clearly more polished, perhaps more playful as well, but without losing their drive or grime. “One important criterion for me is always that I have be able to listen to the record afterward,” admits Johannes Enders. “The pieces should develop, have as many dimensions as possible, and yet still work in detail as well.” Last but not least, the whole thing, mixed and master by Guido Hieronymus in Munich, has to sound good as well. Very good, in fact. But that too, as Johannes Enders knows, is not just a question of taste but also a matter of opinion. “Billy Hart once said: ‘Who cares what it sounds like. The important thing is that the music is good.’ I’ve always stuck to that.” The best examples of that are now on Random Guru, the new album by Enders Room. And when the sextet goes on tour, starting in March 2008. Then a lot goes. And a lot more runs.