“I met up with Rusty and his girlfriend Mina at Kauf Dich Glucklich on Oderberger Strasse the day before he flew back to New York, Rusty told me he’d been record-shopping at nearby Dense (the best Berlin record shop) and had bought a vinyl copy of Holger Hiller’s Oben Im Eck album […] “Oben im Eck” is one of my favourite songs ever. It’s a mysterious, surreal, plodding, detached art song, a sort of Paul Celan poem set to sampled harps, with a sinuous, wandering melody line and the disembodied warbling of Billy McKenzie behind Hiller’s light, octaved vocals. The result is utterly lovely, but really stands outside any sort of pop or rock tradition. Perhaps it could be one of Bjork’s gentler, more experimental moments. It certainly sounds “nordic” in some way, and ancient, and intriguingly strange…” Momus.
“On his second solo effort here, one time Palais Schaumburg member and overarching Neue Deutsche Welle figurehead Holger Hiller […] excised much of the rock element that underpinned his first full length outing Ein Bündel Fäulnis in der Grube. What we have here in lieu of that here is a queer mix of quasi-symphonic and sampler centric bombast and art pop fracture, portioned out with lots of gaps of space in the mix and mixed up with bouts of mischievous chamber R.I.O. of the ZNR, Comelade or Look De Bouk school, occasionally even migrating into Danny Elfman Pee Wee’s Big Adventure territory.” Mutant Sounds.
