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Nuts of Ay, the thirteenth album by the Berlin-based electronic pop duo Tarwater (Ronald Lippok and Bernd Jestram), is their first in a decade, since 2014's Adrift. Beautifully poised and smartly dressed, it's an album that draws Tarwater's various pasts into a high-definition present, while bringing the duo, yet again, into productive dialogue with all kinds of fellow travelers. Tarwater's music has always been marked by a hypnotic pop-ness, but that's particularly evident on Nuts of Ay, where a song like "Hideous Kiss" weaves together jangling guitar, pastoral flute, and flittering electronics into a gem-like construction. While the lyrics of "Hideous Kiss" are written by the duo, Nuts of Ay also continues a longstanding Tarwater tradition of recasting the words of others in their own mould. This time, their remit is broad: poetry from Derek Jarman ("All Nuns") and Millner Place ("Trapdoor Spider"); lyrics from Jean Kenbrovin ("I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles"), the late Shane MacGowan ("USA") and, again, John Lennon ("Everybody Had a Hard Year"). This cast of found and borrowed lyricists also finds collaborative echo in the guest musicians dotted throughout Nuts of Ay. Schneider TM turns up on the lovely, Felt-like "Spirit of Flux", where guitars channel the tangled reveries of Vini Reilly and Maurice Deebank into lush pop. Carsten Nicolai joins, as Alva Noto, dappling "On Waves and Years" with intimate glitching textures; he also provides the album cover art. Elsewhere, Masha Qrella appears on "Down Comes the Goose," and actor Lars Rudolph pitches in for "USA." Both voracious and committed in their creative energies, Jestram and Lippok say there was no concept for the album, which is surprising, perhaps, given its holistic mood, explaining it "grew together like a coral reef in the studio over a period of several years." This music shares a strong sense of place -- whether in the world, or the mind -- and the twelve songs on Nuts of Ay have such similar presence; a shared mood, a shared world, a shared sense of the possibilities of what electronic pop music could, and should, be. A bold and brave pop experiment.
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