Désarroi can mean disarray, distress or the bewilderment produced when the systems normally used for orientation stop functioning. Kammerflimmer Kollektief does not represent that condition through shapeless chaos. The album is full of recurring melodies, recognizable instruments, steady movement and moments approaching conventional song. Disorientation begins because those familiar materials refuse to remain what they first appear to be. A double bass becomes a damaged door opening somewhere below the floor. Harmonium breath turns into weather. Guitar loses the evidence of strings and amplification until it resembles machinery, heat or an animal moving behind a wall. The listener is never completely lost, but every available landmark keeps changing its name.
The six numbered sections of “Désarroi” create the suggestion of an organized suite, yet three separate pieces keep interrupting that order. “Free Form Freak-Out,” “Evol Jam (Edit)” and “Zurück zum Beton” appear like rooms constructed inside a corridor that supposedly had only six doors. Even the sequence cannot decide whether it is one extended composition or nine individual tracks. This uncertainty gives the album its peculiar momentum. It repeatedly establishes a form, discovers an opening in that form and crawls through before the listener has finished measuring the original space.
“Mayhem!” begins with Heike Aumüller’s harmonium sounding simultaneously ancient, intimate and slightly ill. Air enters the reeds, but the resulting tones do not provide the devotional stability often associated with the instrument. They sway and scrape against Johannes Frisch’s double bass, whose bowing, knocking and low-frequency movement immediately loosen the floor. Thomas Weber’s guitar and electronic devices approach from less identifiable directions. The trio seems to be assembling a chamber ensemble from instruments that remember being used for other purposes. Mayhem arrives not as an explosion but as several small uncertainties discovering that they can coexist.
“Grundstürzend” suggests something radical enough to overturn foundations, and the track makes that idea physical. A dub-like pulse supplies temporary gravity while delays and displaced fragments create depth around it, but Frisch is not required to secure the rhythm in the conventional role of bassist. Loops can maintain the clock, freeing the double bass to creak, slide, scrape and resist whatever order has been established. This division of labor is central to the record. Machinery preserves enough repetition for the human players to become unstable. Instead of electronics liberating music from bodily inconsistency, the electronics allow the bodies to become more inconsistent, vulnerable and alive.
“Free Form Freak-Out” removes much of the shelter provided by groove. Sounds arrive as torn surfaces, pressure changes and interrupted gestures whose sources are difficult to identify. Yet the track never becomes a pile of random noise. The trio has recorded not only the ideal tone of each instrument but its entire physical situation: fingers, breath, wood, friction, room reflections and the complaint produced when an object is pushed beyond its polite range. The recording listens around the notes as carefully as it listens to them. What normally would be edited away becomes evidence that music is being made by materials with limits.
This attention to failure is not accidental. Kammerflimmer Kollektief does not pursue perfection as the removal of mistakes, resistance or unintended sound. A perfect surface would destroy the album’s most important information. The creak tells us how much force is being applied. The breath tells us how long a phrase can be sustained. An unstable effect reveals that electricity and equipment are participating rather than merely obeying. Désarroi treats imperfection not as romantic decoration but as a method of preserving causation. Every sound carries some trace of what had to happen for it to exist.
At the center, “Evol Jam” turns love backward and then attempts to rebuild it. Aumüller repeats the idea that the more one loves, the greater one’s capacity for love becomes. Her voice is unusually tender, almost close enough to feel spoken directly into the listener’s ear, while guitar and harmonium gather a fragile song around it. Then language begins losing its stable shape. Words stretch, syllables detach and the voice becomes another acoustic substance entering the electronics. Meaning dissolves into sound before gradually finding its way back toward the original phrase.
That journey gives the song more weight than a simple affirmation could carry. Love is not preserved by keeping it untouched. It enters confusion, loses grammar, becomes noise and still attempts to return. The album does not oppose tenderness and extremity. Tenderness becomes radical because it remains exposed while the structure around it is failing. Aumüller’s voice is not protected from the trio’s disorienting processes; it is allowed to pass through them. When the phrase returns, it has survived rather than merely repeated itself.
“Burned” emerges with enough rhythmic drive to suggest rock, dance music or some shadowy late-night hybrid, but the track refuses to select one destination. Claps, rebounds, guitar movement and buried voices form a groove whose edges remain in motion. The title implies that the damage has already occurred. What we hear is not fire at its theatrical height but matter afterward, still releasing heat and changing composition. The trio’s production works similarly. Instruments are not presented in their untouched state. They arrive processed by contact with the other players, microphones, loops, amplifiers and room, each carrying residue from the larger event.
“Unlösbar” means insoluble or impossible to solve, and its bowed bass and tremolo guitar make unresolved tension into a complete environment. The instruments circle one another without agreeing upon which one is foreground, rhythm or obstruction. Faster movement briefly promises an escape, but acceleration merely generates additional angles. The track does not fail to solve its problem. It recognizes that certain problems remain productive precisely because no final answer can close them. Listening becomes less a hunt for resolution than a willingness to remain near incompatible truths.
The compact “Saumselig” slows that process into delay itself. The word suggests tardiness, dawdling or a refusal to proceed at the expected speed. Trembling tones and rubbing textures occupy a dim space where time appears reluctant to complete its next step. On an album already filled with loops, delayed signals and unstable forms, this brief piece reveals procrastination as another compositional method. A sound postpones its disappearance. A transition fails to arrive on schedule. What might be considered inactivity begins developing its own texture.
Then “Zurück zum Beton” returns us to concrete. S.Y.P.H.’s original song rejected sentimental fantasies of pure nature and called for a return to cities, subways, artificiality and human construction. Kammerflimmer Kollektief removes much of the original punk attack and discovers melancholy, intimacy and even sensual pleasure inside its argument. Aumüller sings over flickering double bass and delicate percussion, making concrete sound less like brutal architecture than a human-made surface carrying generations of touch, dirt, labor and memory. The group does not cover the song by reproducing its historical aggression. It rotates the song until another emotional face becomes visible.
Placed near the album’s end, the cover also provides an answer to the surrounding disorientation. The answer is not a return to nature, purity or a world before machines. It is a return to construction. Concrete is mixed, poured, shaped and allowed to harden; it is artificial, collective and capable of becoming a shelter, public square, prison or monument. Music is constructed through similarly ambiguous acts. Kammerflimmer Kollektief cuts fragments from jazz, dub, psychedelia, punk, improvisation and song, but refuses to restore them to their original cultural rooms. These materials are poured together and made to bear unfamiliar weight.
“Mayhem! (Reprise)” returns to the beginning without returning the listener to the same place. A reprise normally confirms that a theme has survived its journey, but here the journey has altered our hearing of the theme. After voices have dissolved, bass has abandoned its grounding function and punk has become a smoky ballad, the original mayhem no longer resembles simple disorder. It sounds like the condition from which every temporary order emerged. The album closes its circle while leaving the circle visibly cracked.
That is the deeper deception of Désarroi. Its wildness is carried through a trio playing with extraordinary restraint. Its most abstract sections contain bodily detail; its most accessible song is gradually dismantled; its punk cover becomes tender; and its loops create freedom rather than confinement. Kammerflimmer Kollektief does not hide meaning behind deliberate obscurity. It allows several meanings to remain active without forcing one to defeat the others. Music can be artificial and intimate, composed and improvised, comforting and structurally unsound.
The result resembles a building whose rooms remain usable even though none of the walls meet at dependable angles. You can enter, rest, dance, listen or become lost, sometimes during the same track. The floor creaks because somebody is walking across it. The harmonium wheezes because air is being forced through a body. The guitar becomes unrecognizable because recognition is only one small function sound can perform. Désarroi does not rescue the listener from disorientation. It makes disorientation habitable, then quietly demonstrates how much tenderness can survive there.
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