Burkhard Stangl is a remarkably delicate guitarist. He has a great ear for not playing, leaving prolonged silences for his partners to set a tone, and then softly strumming open chordings on his acoustic or creating quiet, distorted washes on his Gibson SG. Stangl clearly loves the sound of his instruments. Beyond simple playing, he values the buzz of a string hit too hard or the scrape created by sliding his fingers along the neck. He definitely has, and leaves behind, a rock sensibility, which makes his a valuable voice in the excellent quartet Polwechsel (with saxophonist John Butcher), and makes his duo with Dieb13 something unique.

His playing pushes such microsound projects into more overtly musical areas than others in electro-acoustic experimentation. As with Polwechsel, the duo with Dieb13 feeds on the tension of something about to happen. Energy slowly and continually mounts, with little crescendo and without release.

Dieb13 is the sort of turntablist who doesn't relying on the sounds etched into his records. Except for a segment of broken spoken phrases during a midnight set marking the release of their eh on erstwhile, his contributions were ambient and brief, ethereal melody lines and surface noise eminating from vinyl platters. If he tended to be under Stangl's playing, he still seemed to be leading the way.

One of a number of things Erstwhile has done well is creating visual imagery that matches the music. Billy Roisz created live computer animation on a screen behind the musicians, pushing blocks of color through a constant grid, creating a complimentary fast-moving-yet-unchanging visual field that suggested the mundane chaos of city life, as if it were a thermal image of Midtown Manhattan: 36 blocks of bustle and repitition. Like the music, it makes going somewhere seem like such an unnecessary effort.