BLACK TO COMM

s/t

10”, Dekorder

Once again Dekorder strays far away from the dancefloor and releases music from the fringes of electronic music, even though visually – minimal design with uni-colored sleeve and no printing, clear-vinyl and limited edition of 250 – this ten inch might easily be mistaken for a dance-record in the bin. I’d like to see the face of the aspiring DJ, when he puts this record on the turntable in the store to do his customary ten-second-a-plate-listening (usually using his full hands and fingers to handle the records, which makes an old vinyl-lover like me cringe with disgust and pain. Obviously, these DJ-wannabes, though they all demand vinyl-records, either no absolutely nothing about vinyl – for instance that touching the surface with your fingers leaves marks of sweat and fat which make dust and dirt stick to the surface and thereby ruin the record – or they just don’t give a damn anyway.) Anyway, our young, supercool DJ-dude puts on Black to Comm, expecting some cool beats and a groovy bassline, and, of course, he puts the needle right in the middle of the first side, and “boom” – he is confronted with a multilayered, quirky and weirdly sounding drone that actually starts at the beginning of the side, grows and grows and adds more and more layers and the slowly but definitely stops towards the end of the side. Our aspiring super-DJ won’t believe it, so he will flip the needle further and further into the record only to discover bigger and bigger walls of indescribable sounds.

Unbelievingly shaking his head, he might even turn the record over and start his accustomed procedure of listening into records, the well-known ten-second-a-record marathon by only listening to small portions of each record at the beginning, the middle and the two thirds-mark of each side. This way he is not at all prepared, for what is to come next, because side A of this release turns into a beautiful harsh-noise-piece at the end. Side B starts off like a Melvins-bass-drone-record and then moves slowly but steadily into the harsh-noise-territory of the end of side A by laying interferences and bass-drones over each other over and over again and then suddenly introducing interference-sounds and white-noise-frequency-manipulation. Actually, this is a beautiful mixture of Aube and Buddhist mantras, but I don’t think our DJ will see the references. My guess is, he will put the headsets away after ingesting Black To Comm, take a deep breath and search for the latest EP by Basement Jaxx or by any other well-known dance-project.