Trein Maersk: A Report To The NATOarts Board Of Directors

I discovered Icebreaker International over the web, I’d never heard of them before. Having listened to the sample track ‘Port of Yokohama’ on their website, I just had to get the album, and was not disappointed. Alex Perls and Simon Break boarded a container ship in Japan, and this beautiful electronic soundtrack to a seven week sea voyage halfway around the world is the result. Think Air crossed with Underworld with hints of Aphex Twin – trust me it works! The album hangs together beautifully as a complete piece of music. I love the CD Booklet as well – a series of articles on each of the ports visited during the voyage (Source: A Customer 2000a, np link).

Dance boffins Icebreaker International purport to be the musical wing of Nato, with a directive to promote global harmony through music. It is a manifesto which lends shape and form to their otherwise ambient meanderings. Inhabiting the same space as Plone or Steve Reich, Icebreaker play off delicate melodies against clever-clogs electronica (Source: Cowan 2000, np).

[Trein Maersk] does for boat trips what Kraftwerk’s Autobhan did for city-to-city motorway excursions (Source: Cooper 2000, np link).

The oceanic equivalent of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, Trein Maersk is an audio travelogue intended to promote free international trade (no kidding); as a result, Icebreaker’s second record gets even more deeply conceptual than their excellent debut, err, report (Source: Kellman nd, np link).

This CD sounds a bit like Kraftwerk and Brian Eno, but with some poppier elements. It’s long and the sounds of the boat journey are carried throughout. ‘The Third Way’ is especially nice – the guitar playing has a strange mechanistic quality to it (Source: stumpf 2000, np link).

[It is a] clear-sighted blend of breathtaking electropop and conceptual rigour (Source: Hollings 2001, np link).

Languid and expansive, politically deft and conceptually tight, [it] combine[s] 1980s synth-pop periodicity with field recordings, documentary fragments and words of recorded wisdom from various unidentified economists. To single out one track from a sequence that retains the kind of complexity and coherence rarely seen since Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity is not easy. Port Of Yokohama benefits from the heavenly Trance swirlings of the Free State YFZ Mix, while Don Rat’s IMF Mix and the minimalist Technofunk of ‘Yokohama – A Symphonic Picture’ build upon the gentle grandeur of the original. A masterpiece four times over (Source: Anon 2001, np link).

Train Maersk, thunders out of the tunnel of overplayed electro-progressive-deepgroove-minimalist cyber pop with a penchant for spectacle demolishing situationist conceptual textualism. Once again NATOARTS has unleashed another radical geo-bipartisan dissertation that demands the acclaim and admiration of its ever-widening network of international devotees (Source: A Customer, 2000b link)

Different than the minimalist bent of [previous album] Distant Early Warning, Trein Maersk offers up more beats (take ’em or leave ’em) along playful melodies: think Craftmatic-lazy-boy infomercial music meets Steve Reich meets Perrey-Kingsley’s ‘Baroque Hoedown’ (Source: Karel 2003, np link).

This is an intense disc. … The tunes are really good – from the poppy ‘Port of Yokohama’ to the epic ‘Port of Rotterdam’. Their previous disc was a bit cold for me, but this one is warm and friendly in an eerie way (Source: James 2000, np link).

‘North Atlantic’, a meditative piece for unaccompanied guitar, offers a brief change of mood … Its langour and stillness also work particularly well against the translucent forward thrust of ‘Port Of Halifax’. [In] ‘Port Of Dubai’ … [h]eavy Moroder-inspired sequencers transform the corporate video zest of the original into something far more predatory and uncompromising. Icons of commercial growth and global prosperity are replaced on screen by helicopter gunships, riot police and burning cars. Iraqi TV coverage of Saddam Hussein waving and smiling is juxtaposed with footage looted from Walt Disney’s Aladdin (Source: Hollings 2001, np link).

Concept albums we have seen plenty of, but concept bands? … The new album, Trein Maersk, is not set in a barren, snow-covered locale but rather in the busiest ports of call of the world. As such, there is much flashing lights and hustle and bustle to Icebreaker’s sound on this release – a much more human element – bringing it out of the Artic wasteland and putting more weight on the Eno side of their sound. While those flashing lights can create a warm, bouncy sound that is just as enveloping as the band’s debut, they can also bring the mercury level of the music too far up, making it so warm it seems like dance music on tracks like ‘Port of Singapore’ or like children’s video game music like on ‘Port of Dubai.’ While a lot of the album is warm and sprightly, the band does tone down their sound substantially during the second half of the album when the band is traveling through the colder-climated ports, bringing the music back closer to the sound of Distant Early Warning. Ultimately, this style of music is more successful for Icebreaker than the techno-pop inspired by the warmer ports. The music can be highly repetitive, as in the epic tracks named after the ports of Rotterdam and Halifax, creating a constant ebb and flow of delicate guitar patterns that very slowly and gradually change over time. While on this musical voyage, Icebreaker’s music does alter with each port of call, but there is little addition of any sort of local flavor. As is implied by the voice samples in the songs and the liner notes, the ‘global economy’ has become an Anglo / American makeover for the rest of the world, and, as such, Icebreaker’s music is more affected by the temperature and pace of the ports and seas than any local culture or customs they encounter. More accurately, the culture they encounter is so Americanized and sterilized, it has no effect (Source: Anon 2000a, np link).

Think the love child of alan Greenspan and the Alan Parsons Project, playing synthesizer on a sea cruise. An ode to global economy in principle and sonic design … Thematically, their high-concept agitpop bounces in the wake of a container ship sailing from Yokohama to Halifax. Musically, its a trip through the boom on gossamer wings, mixing in brief squawks from seagulls and soaring technocratic sound bites. There’s no doubt in this pro-WTO disco that a rising tide floats all boats. Free your trade – the rest will follow (Source: Goggins 2000, np link).

Political art in the early 21st century seems to almost universally come from a leftist perspective, and NatoArts is seeking to address that imbalance by providing an alternative voice’ [says Icebreaker International’s Alexander Perls]. One of those voices on Trein Maersk is, by the way of a sample, that of American right-winger Pat Buchanan, heard singing the praises of the Third Way, the frankly vague political non-ideology subsequently embraced by Tony Blair’s New Labour. While one suspects a subliminally manipulative intent on Trein Maersk, Perls maintains that ‘the mission of NatoArts is a reasonable and necessary one (Source: Cooper 2000, np link).

This is an electro-pop masterpiece … and the liner notes are reams of mostly indecipherable WTO-style economic theory (Source: A Customer 2000c, np link).

The album … has very extensive sleevenotes which will explain the why and where we went on the trip and what we found at each port in our investigations (Source: Hailney & Smith, 2000 link).

… the booklet featur[es] seemingly straightforward reports to NATO on port issues and the advantages of hiring foreign non-union help (Source: Karel 2003, np link).

The booklet is more extensive than one you can find accompanying a rock opera, containing exhaustive information on the ports, trade policies, maps, and photos of subjects ranging from Mexican dock workers in Halifax to the port of Rotterdam’s board of directors. Who says modern music has no educational value (Source: Kellman nd, np link)?

Trein Maersk … is intended for use not only by academics and policymakers, but as a guide for artists, merchants, and members of the public who wish to make connections between contemporary developments in conceptual art and international trade. Mr. Break and Mr. Perls hope that this document will serve as a tool to open national markets to free and unfettered global exchange (Source: Anon 2000b, np link).

… with Trein Maersk’s sleeve depicting the pair be-suited, self-conciously hunched over electronic equipment, too po-faced for comfort, Nato security passes to the fore, you could be forgiven for thinking it was all an elaborate prank, with Perls and Break, both former LSE students, riding on an old-time wave of sixties Situationist subversion, with a fountain of latter day irony sprayed on top. And this is before you get to the academic essays explaining the economic pros and cons of each port of call, let alone the NatoArts: A Retrospective exhibition in New York. Not since the British Electric Foundation, who begat Heaven 17, have electro-pop boffins in suits adopted such a corporate, not to say conservative, identity (Source: Cooper 2000, np link).

Is this a joke? Are they leftists trying to depict the sound of a global economy? Take a look at the web site and there’s no doubt about it. ‘Trein Maersk’ is a more diverse record than the first, more upbeat as well. Some songs even express a frenzy delirious state. It’s hard to explain why I actually like this band. The music, especially on ‘Trein Maersk’ is somewhat repulsive, but for me that repulsiveness is suitable for making something of the theme – free trade and the global economy. I was returning to Turku after Christmas, killing time on the horrendous Viking Line. Trying to get some sleep, in the state of half-drunkenness, I was listening to ‘Trein Maersk’ in headphones. That was a great experience. (I’m being phenomenological again) (Source: Lindman 2008, np link).

Sure fellas, we’re getting sleepy. The joke is no good if you don’t hold up your end of the bargain. First two tracks stand out, one somewhere in the middle as well is nice, but the whole album is a little weak, thin sounding at times, too much concept, not enough music. Electronics and guitar repetitions and variations. Usually a cup of tea drunk heartily, when steeped properly. But, the leaves must be prepared properly as well, and then the packaging should be appealing, and when I say tea I don’t mean dried bits of fruit or odd plants and such, I mean tea, except when I mean roobois. NATOArts, really? (Source: Dermeyer 2007, np link).

My immediate reaction … is that the current ideology of international free trade is compared to the rhetoric of the cold war, with the effect of parody. The point here is perhaps that the ‘free trade’ frenzy is no less ideological than anti-soviet propaganda during the height of the cold war (Source: Lindman 2008, np link).

If it takes an elaborate ruse to get them noticed, they seem to smirk, then so be it. For all their intellectual vigour, decoy organisations, and, we hope, sarcastic support of global corporate policy, the ambiguous duo hark back to an era when the shock of the new made electronic experiments in music immediately viable. State-of-the-art technology notwithstanding, techno workouts like ‘The Third Way’ and the beguiling guitar loops on ‘North Atlantic’ reflect a regressive sensibility. The conceptual journey by sea, from ‘Port Of Yokohama’ to the overlong, if hypnotic ‘Port Of Halifax’, is also hampered by a refusal to use local colour to set the scene. Too close to multi-cultural world music for comfort, perhaps. And that’s the idea in a nutshell – a grandiose, symphonic, electro mockery of a capitalist global village where the music speaks with one voice, and only language differences suggest any travel at all. Smart, if ultimately bloodless (Source: Anon 2000c, np link).

Somehow … the whole thing works. The imagery, music and language used throughout – in the art exhibits, brochure, website and CD – combine to produce a work of multi media which is a perplexing, sinister – but by no means unbelievable – portrait of Big Brother masquerading as The People’s Friend. It’s art, Jim, but not as we know it. But what does the real NATO think of it all? ‘We have a bit of fun keeping an eye on them’ says NATO spokesman, Lee Mcclenny, ‘but it is just an artistic hoax. While NATO is a serious organisation manned by serious people, we are human enough to see the funny side.’ And suddenly it all becomes clear: The funny side? Surely the point is, when it comes to global security, there is no funny side (Source: Nelson 2000, p.22 link & link)