Baldruin - Aventüren

Johannes Schebler grew up in a rectory in a small Bavarian village, literally next door to a church. Congregational singing, organ, and bells were ambient noise for him as a child. He served as an altar boy. He has an older brother with Williams-Beuren syndrome, and in an interview he suggests that living with someone who relates to sound in an unfiltered way may have shaped what he finds interesting in music. He came to making records not through formal training but through discovering improvised and ritualistic music in his early twenties, realising, as he puts it, “how effortlessly atmospheric, dense music can be created by amateurs.” That was 2009. He has made more than a dozen records as Baldruin since.

Aventüren, out now on Kythibong, is his most playful record. The title is an archaic German term from courtly chivalric poetry, the perilous quest a knight seeks out to prove himself, and the album presents its fourteen pieces as stops along a journey. That conceit might suggest something ponderous, but the album grew out of something much smaller: improvised games with his young son, in which Schebler slipped between characters and voices. That intimacy is audible throughout. The track titles, Messdiener-Gossip, Quacksalbers Quest, Die kosmische Wachtel, Irmentraud & Horatio, carry the same register, Grimm-adjacent strangeness, surrealist domestic oddity.

The structures draw on minimal music, repeating rhythmic cycles and short melodic cells that build rather than develop. Marimba and glockenspiel are central, alongside strings, percussion, and voice elements treated as texture. Church bells recur. The acoustic sources are processed and reshaped through electronics, so the results sit somewhere between chamber folk and an invented sonic tradition that never quite existed. Steve Reich and Philip Glass are in the DNA, but the press around the album frames it accurately when it says the results lean toward an imaginary folklore rather than strict minimalism. Popol Vuh and Klaus Schulze are probably closer reference points temperamentally.

Mastering is by Giuseppe Ielasi, whose work suits this kind of record. Artwork by Mahlergruppe. Limited vinyl edition alongside the digital release.

Schebler also works as Yayoba and in collaborations with Brannten Schnüre’s Katie Rich and Christian Schoppik. Aventüren is Baldruin at his warmest.

Aventüren is out now on Bandcamp via KYTHIBONG.