KRUZR KEN – addicts & satan
(CD – r.a.i.g.)
A highly limited CD release in
handstamped envelopes with untitled (that is actually number-titled) tracks
containing a variety of psyched out, looped feedback noise, droning
distortion, strange vocals and spastic drumming – how does that
description strike you? To me, it makes me itch inside my bones and all over
shaking with excitement. An avantgarde noise project from Moscow is
something you won’t get to hear a lot around here, so let’s put it on.
“addicts & satan” is
truly something special. Feedback orgies counterparted with eerie screams
and meauwing are back to back with bursts of chaotic drumming and no-end
spliced tapeloops of noise. Artem Galkin, responsible for drums and
feedback, and Pavel Eremeev, responsible for bass playing and more feedback,
are taking their obsessions to the fringe in a very exciting way. True,
there is quite a big number of bands, especially instrumental duos, out
there, who play some sort of more or less extremist noise rock, usually
quite boring, to be honest, but there are also bands like Lightning Bolt
and The Ruins – to name two from polar opposites of the bass / drum noise
universe – who make the concept more appealing.
Kruzr Ken on the other hand
tune the whole concept down to its pure basics, hide away in some dark
rehearsal space where it is probably cold and wet, and let it rip. Then take
the mastering to the tapes, in a very primitive and basic way as well. But
it is this primitivism that makes the CD stand out. Because the result is
ruthlessly direct and as basic as possible in its execution. In a more
expensive studio or with more money available for the recording, the drums
would probably hit harder and the bass feedback would fill the room much
stronger, but the primitive energy and the directness of the recording would
probably also have been lost. And that kind of direct energy goes a long
way.
I just wondered what the easy
availability of great recording tools and software and the high level of
mastering and cleanness of production does to the young generations of
songwriters and artists. When you have to push your software hard to
override its settings and produce some great noise – and that is the
minimum requirement for artistic work with any new instrument: to see where
its boundaries are and what lies behind them – I hope the result is not
that there is a generation of sound artists coming up at us interested in
the cleanness and sterility of computer generated music. I mean, we had that
sort of in the late Eighties / early Nineties and neverminding the good
press most of techno is receiving still nowadays, it was bland and trite and
boring and shortlived (albeit rebirthing itself almost every day.)
