Unlock the Stillness is the new project from German composer and percussionist Manos Tsangaris and producer Dieter Krauthausen, building on the “hypnotic percussions” (Boomkat) of the 1990 groove track Elephant’s Easy Moonwalk Through the Night – “a brain-bending musical achievement” (Bleep) re-released on Nonplace in 2017 after achieving cult status amongst collectors and DJs – as well as his decades-long collaboration with Jaki Liebezeit in the drum collective Drums Off Chaos.
In Telepathic Talents, Tsangaris and Krauthausen take the cerebral grooves and surreal soundscapes of their debut self-titled EP from 2021, and send them into another dimension with the help of the Hendrix stylings of Swedish violinist Karin Hellqvist. Tsangaris’ spoken word vocals underpin the record with a poetic flow that takes in both the whimsical and the
profound.
At the heart of the EP are the idiosyncratic percussive grooves – at times hypnotic, at others playful or even gnarly – which, like the debut release, were mostly recorded without using a single drum, rather turning to found objects in the recording studio as source material.