Pounding live-electronics, deranged vocals, free jazz improv - Shibuya Motors is a project composed of well-known figures of Slovak experimental music scene. Miro Toth is a composer and founder of the improv collective Fruti di Mare, Slavo Krekovic is the man behind Atrakt Art label, Next Festival and plenty of other experimental-friendly activities in the Slovak capital.
Their new release features the amazing Austrian drummer dd kern renowned from his collaborations with Philipp Quehenberger and numerous bands including Fuckhead or Bulbul.
It’s been a perennial discussion of ours, at least since starting this project - what does and doesn’t belong to Eastern Europe. Is the post-Cold War world still divided into east and west? The more we’ve travelled across the region - and living here all our lives - the more we think that the distinctions are pretty much still in place. Now more for economic reasons, but with the impending $$$ apocalypse in the west, this might change. East, however, is still east and west remains west. The history, culture and people won’t change with a handshake. Part of our ongoing discussion is also whether to include Russia and other post-soviet countries in the scope of our sonic interest.
Increasingly, we’ve been finding more and more interesting projects from this region and even though we do not necessarily intend to start covering Russia per se, we might randomly post something from there. So here is a lo-fi dreamy video made on a 40-buck budget for Love Cult, a boy-girl duo from Karelia.
The Polish label Concrete Cut gears up and brings us Deam’s Square Love EP. The producer Michał Lewicki lives just outside of Warsaw and after “years of making music at home” releases his dancy 6-track debut EP.
Deam’s uk funky / 2step influenced sound is deep and warm, its funky synths roll smoothly over cycling beats and bleeps, pitch-shifted vocal samples and an all-embracing bass. Square Love EP is a step into a slightly another direction for Concrete Cut - into a domain of more mercurial dance electronica - and it seems like the future is bright for the leading Polish label.
Massive blocks of sound, eroded by entropy into weird fractal pictures of mankind’s downfall / empty cities ovegrown by nature / random flashes of violence slowly enter the sonic ecosystem inhabited by frequencies that flow down on tilted walls of noise. Ibogain kappagrams.
Hailing from the harsh concrete habitats of the Slovak capital city - Bratislava, Slovakia’s premiere live electronica project Poo has outgrown all geographical boundaries. Formed by the electronic musicians Rentip (Robert Bittner) and ::.: (Daniel Toth) their music is difficult and challenging and perhaps it may even appear evil to the common sense, a combination of opposite principles clashing - microsounds against organic drones, subtle vs. crude structures, meditation over flickering noise..
Poo live @ Music Laboratory in 2010 with Dead Voices on Air, Urbanfailure, Rentip, et. all, photo by Morrigan
After releasing their debut LP Flourescent on 11 Fingers Records in 2005, and moving on to develop their individual side-projects (Rentip, ::.:, Angakkut, 1/x) Poo are back with a new track. Kappa-Opioid Gain. A taste of things to come, with Poo’s second LP scheduled for next summer. Kappa-Opiod Gain is somewhat of a post-ibogain comedown - from the aural fog of firing kappa-opioid receptors some unsettling sonic reality starts to emerge, one composed of massive, slow dubby drones, a black mess, delicate frequencies, chaos, magick.
Poo deliver a hypnotizing sythesis of Rentip’s taste for abstract beats and ::.:’s taste for complex drone psychedelia reinforcing that one can make a radical, yet poetic sound with an almost scientific aproach to sound synthesis and composition. Apart from the single, Poo have also prepared a remix-pack (get it at their web) for those interested in refashioning the Kappa-Opioid Gain track which will then be included on a further remix release.
The Slovenian Irena Tomažin expresses herself through the most natural human instrument - the voice. She tests its limits and abilities though, and at the same time employs its age-old use - lullabies and folk-inflected lush melodies.
Irena Tomažin, working under her acronym IT, is a dance performer and sonic artist working with spoken word and various dictaphone and tape recorders. Her full-length album Crying Games was released in the beginning of September with tracks like Ophellia Muller quoting Heiner Mueller’s Hamletmachine.
Crying, caughing, screeches, yearning, longing, sound collages reminescent of musique concrete’s aesthetic - a truly and bona-fide avant-garde work that is theatrical, intimate and utterly strange and scary (and hence, we like it:)
