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Stick to it
Karl Ritter, guitarist of the Austrian retro-dino group "Kurt Ostbahn & Die Kombo", formerly "Ostbahn-Kurti & Die Chefpartie". When, in the mid-eighties, the point was to develop as much of rock'n'roll fun as possible into antibodies against the ruling yuppie hedonism, it was Ritter who was responsible for the raw, infernal keynote of this exceedingly successful fun band.
Vroooom-Vroooom-Vroom-Vroom: First of all, this meant "I heard it through the grapevine" in Viennese, but as well, it meant musical world-class (if only Viennese hadn't been such a self-inflicted marketing restriction).
Legendary guitar solos in legendary concerts. Section: If Springsteen could play a solo, it would sound like this or much the same. Exaltation among the audience. Fan clubs celebrating Ritter, idolizing his nimble fingers and long teeth. But then, concurrently, the breaking points. Not that Karl Ritter did not love rock'n'roll. But he also wanted to have a shelf to put it in its proper place. So, at home, he sat down in front of his record player, listening his way into most bulky schemes of twelve-tone music, notating, just for practice, Ernst Krenek melodies on music-paper, thus to himself opening up every theory that enabled him to understand his strings better, to fantasize their possibilities, to try, to discard.
Sure, the original blues scheme is written in Karl Ritter's heart blood, and one day, when he will drop from a '57 chevy because the time has come, blue blood will ooze out of his ears like of any genuine blues man's (that day still being far off, anyhow, since all of them genuine blues people hold a secret life insurance once they have survived their 23rd birthdays. You just ask Mr John Lee Hooker).
Ritter, however, has decided to illuminate the shades of the blues; to listen to his guitar when it is really crying (like on track 1 of this album); being heavy, slow, sombre, clammy; to combine kinds of music that only meet in a rehearsal basement or a recording studio - complicated, artificial samples and, for example, the fresh, smiling slide guitar; hypernervous grooves, sent into the blue by one tranquil hell of a guitar so you have to whisper and cry after them; but also sky-high beautiful, heavenly sad sighs from the slide guitar (which were originally composed as music for a film - "Schwarzfahrer" - but, being suggestive and warm-hearted, as they are, have long since painted their own pictures into the sky). So far, Ritter has created four albums out of his guitaristic ideas. They are basement albums, heaven albums, noise albums, heart albums, all mixed colourfully. This one is titled "Stick To It", and is something like a "Best Of"-CD.
Meaning: it puts musical extracts from the compositional life of one of the best Austrian composers into a new coherence of meaning, connecting parts that have not yet belonged together.
Not that "Stick To It" compiles Ritter's most agreeable pieces into a more or less spectacular album.
He just rends his heart open and lets the blue blood flow.
Christian Seiler (transl.)
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