Album Review: All the Right Noises by Roman Flügel

Anthropologist Marc Augé calls hotels and airports "non-places," where "people are always, and never, at home." As a touring DJ, Roman Flügel probably spends as much time in non-places as clubs or his studio. The Frankfurt-based artist has said that his third album for Dial, All The Right Noises, is very much a product of those surroundings. In particular, it's about the solitary time in hotel rooms between gigs, and that strange mixture of peace and isolation.Flügel isn't the first musician to explore these non-spaces.

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Roman Flügel has released hundreds of tracks over the roughly quarter-century since he began putting out records, and in them he has explored many permutations of four-on-the-floor dance music: hard techno, acid trance, willfully lunkheaded electro-house, lyrical deep house. The Frankfurt native doesn't tend to stay in any one place for too long. On his 2014 album Happiness Is Happening he delved into glinting synth-pop and Krautrock's motorik chug; earlier this year, his Verschiebung EP explored polyrhythmic drum sounds as dry and scratchy as strep throat.

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Roman Flügel opens his newest album, All The Right Noises, with a track that uncannily grasps at the intimacy of Owen Pallett and Will Butler's score to Spike Jonze's Her. Tonality and instrumentation aside, the overture of All The Right Noises is subtle, reserved and warm. In a way that is unusual for the artist's conventional category, Flügel calmly coaxes the listener into a mellow state of mind for the remainder of the record.

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Roman Flügel 'All The Right Noises' (Dial)A good quarter of a century into his musical career, Roman Flügel is still capable of absolutely tearing up dancefloors with electro-techno that straddles credibility and mainstream impact as well as anyone in the game. Here, though, he’s in contemplative mode. This album is, by his own account, an antidote to the wild dancefloors he plays to every weekend – and though there is techno of sorts on ‘All The Right Noises’, it’s very much of a horizontal variety.

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