Schneider Tm is Dirk Dresselhaus, a German electronic noisemaker with a proclivity for hypnotic grooves and dense aural landscapes. He underscores layers of sounds with simple, repetitive beats, and the effect is less chilling than Kraftwerk but more accessible than Can or Faust. The blips and bleeps are almost danceable on Moist but a far cry from any generic techno. Schneider Tm eschews the predictability of premeditated electronic music and fights such complacency with a slew of bizarre sounds that grow like spores within each song.

All of Schneider Tm’s titles are chosen by the sound of the words rather their meanings, so the only thing linking the songs is a consistently dark tone. The recording is very compressed and claustrophobic like shaking up a bottle of dangerous chemicals and watching them flicker and spin with nowhere to go. The results are hypnotic. Moist is a very busy record. All of the tracks veer off into strange musical tangents that pulse and buzz and grind but always blend seamlessly together. This stuff is addictive although very cold and removed.

Schneider Tm has been tagged by the ever trendy New Musical Express as a part of a movement called Teutonic Boom, which lumps together some of today’s modern electronic experimenters like Mouse On Mars, Oval, and Tarwater with 60’s and 70’s Krautrock (Neu, Can). Obviously, as with any pigeonholing, the tag is limiting and, as is the case with Schneider Tm, horribly inaccurate. This music is far less pretentious than the self-indulgent German experimentalism of the late 60’s. Schneider Tm is making edgy and bizarre pop music, whereas his predecessors sought to unlearn the boundaries of pop in a not-so-listenable form. Moist is short, sharp and leaves you uneasy just like a good record should.