Posts Tagged ‘ant-zen’

Kadaitcha – Urban Somnambulistics

Posted: 7 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Ant-Zen – 7th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Kadaitcha’s Urban Somnambulistics was originally released on cassette in 2017, and was lauded for its dark atmospherics and rumbling narrative, spoken in Russian. A lot has happened since then, and the Ukrainian duo have, against all odds, remained active, releasing Tramontane in September 21023, and now a new version of Urban Somnambulistics, with the vocals in English. It’s not only the urban landscape of Ukraine which has changed since the album’s initial release, but the cultural landscape also, and the decision to re-record the lyrics in English was in some ways a reaction to the cultural and political context which has evolved, with Andrii explaining to me that, for him, Russian has become ‘a language of occupancy’.

There had been a shift following the annexation of Crimea in 2024, with some people switching from speaking Russian to Ukrainian, something which became more prevalent following Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

It’s hard to really grasp, from a position of comfort and safety, what it truly means to be an artist in a country which is not only at war, but has now been so for more than three years. The idea of making art under such circumstances seems completely wild, but at the same time, something we’ve learned from the long history of war – and indeed, history as a long thread, riven with tribulation – is that art has always been something we’ve made. It seems as if it’s almost a part of our survival mechanism, and that in difficult times, it’s a compulsion within the human psyche that there’s an absolute necessity to document, to create.

Urban Somnambulistics is dark and intense, and while it’s devoid of beats, it’s far too noisy and gnarly and bears the hallmarks of Throbbing Gristle at their darkest, most experimental best, abrasive, and anything but ‘very friendly’. The vocal on ‘hiding the angel’, while clean but reverby on the original version, is thick with distortion this time around, and significantly darker and more menacing in tone. ‘bushmeat’ is nine minutes of blown-out distortion and fizzing electronics, snapped cables and firing sparks, and it’s not only tense, but intense, not to mention unsettling. It’s a messy noise drift that would work as part of a soundtrack to Threads, a post-apocalyptic drone with the whistle of a bleak wind cutting across a desolate landscape. There is shredding noise, too, metallic devastation: you can almost picture ruined farm buildings hanging on their frames beside cropless fields.

Things really step up with ‘symbiote’, five minutes of oppressively dark industrial grind, before the rather more airy expanse of ‘paninsecta’, a piece that groans and drones, clanks and clatters, cut through with snarls and burrs, distorted vocal utterances just beneath the level of audibility adding an unsettling layer of discomfort. The eleven-minute title track provides the finale, and again, it’s very much in the vein of Throbbing Gristle’s more experimental works – menacing, uncomfortable, unpredictable, and noisy, collaged overlays enmeshing with crunching metal, melting circuitry, harsh drones rising up, a surging sonic tempest.

It’s remarkable that this is an album which was recorded before life in Ukraine changed beyond all recognition, because Urban Somnambulistics appears to convey all the tension and all the devastation of conflict in its presentation of sonic extremities, and its embracing of noise that hits like… like… It has significant impact, and that’s a fact.

AA

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Kojoohar & Frank Ursus – Frost Drought

Posted: 15 March 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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ant-zen – 12th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

First – the format! So much is being made of the vinyl renaissance right now, and much as I love vinyl, it’s hard to be entirely comfortable with this comeback, in this form. Back in the 90s, when CDs were in the ascendence, I often bought vinyl because it was cheaper: I could pick up an LP for £7.50 when a new-release CD was £11. I still have the receipts in my vinyl copies of PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me and Pandemonium by Killing Joke, among other treasures. Now, vinyl is a luxury item. Even a standard LP is around £25, and many are pressed on two pieces of heavyweight vinyl and cost closer to £40, or more if released on Record Store Day. This isn’t right. It’s not honouring the format, it’s another example of exploitation.

But this is rather different, and altogether cooler on so many levels: ant-zen have brought us this release by Kojoohar & Frank Ursus in the form of a 7” EP, with two tracks on each side. You can’t blame them for the price tag given production costs, but the unique hand-printed inlays, etc., at least make each copy unique and make this release a million miles removed from the capitalist conveyor belt.

The thing that matters here is that this release is completely suited to this retro format: a 10” or LP release would have been extravagant, indulgent, and frankly, ill-keeping.

It’s worth quoting the liner note for the back-story here, too: ‘The spark that ignited this collaboration came from a conversation between KOJOOHAR and FRANK URSUS – aka Te/DIS – about the kojoohar album that has just been released at the time and about angst pop and its position in the music scene. talking about new tracks kojoohar was working on, the decision was made to start a collaboration.’

And so we’re presented with Frost Drought, which they describe as ‘a 4-track ep that offers edgy angst pop with analog, gripping synthesizer sounds, metallic rhythms and enigmatic melodies, complementing by frank ursus’ vocals… music and lyrics of FROST DROUGHT describe a world of isolation, mistrust, alienation and the individual’s distance from itself. left alone in the dark…’

Entering the ‘debris field’, we’re presented with dark synths, groaning, whining, whistling, and a slow-tempo-echo-heavy beat. If the baritone vocal is distinctly from the gothier end of post-punk, the instrumentation is equal parts post-punk and ultra-stark, bleak hip-hop. ‘never compromise’ pushes into stark, dark, electro territory, in the realm of mid-80s Depeche Mode. Ursus’ vocals are commanding, but so dark, and the music is so claustrophobic as to be suffocating. ‘never compromise’ sounds like a manifesto, and whipping snares sounds crack and reverberate in an alienating fog of synth, and with hints of Depeche Mode’s ‘Little 15’, it’s as bleak as hell, too. ‘threshold’ is dark and boldly theatrical, like Bauhaus battling it out in the studio with Gary Numan.

There’s no light here: this is dark and it feels like a dragging weight on your chest, on your heart. Drawing on early 80s electro but adding the clinicality of contemporary production – and a dash of Nine Inch Nails – Frost Drought is a challenging work, thick, dense, and intense, it’s a heavy listen, and one that’s incredibly intense.

AA

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Kadaitcha – Tramontane

Posted: 9 September 2023 in Albums
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ant-zen – 16th September 2023

Christopher Nosnbor

Four years on from Tar, Ukrainian industrial duo Kadaitcha, consisting of Andrii Kozhukhar and Yurii Samson, have overcome many, many challenges to deliver album number five, in the form of Tramontane.

The tracks which appeared on their limited lathe-cut single last year do not appear here, and this is admirable: singles so often tend to be used as launchpads for albums, and it was particularly common in the 80s and 90s that albums would sell on the basis of a couple of singles, but would have next to no other decent tracks. In the days before streaming, this was something that was easy to get away with, since the only way of hearing the album was by buying it, which you would do based on the singles. But then, the risk could be reduced by taking punts using your half price or free options through Britanna Music, or similar. The advent of streaming hasn’t really improved things, though, because now, at least in mainstream circles, the album is essentially obsolete.

But outside the mainstream, the album is thriving, and artists are pushing the format now that the constraints and limitations of physical formats aren’t necessarily dictatorial in determining duration, and there are infinite options for exploration. The single wasn’t so much of a stop-gap release as a standalone document of a period in time. But the key point here is that Tramontane is very much an album, and a work to be approached as such. The notes which accompany the release are almost hallucinatory – not quite Burroughs cut-ups, but fragmented, non-linear, and they serve to articulate the essence of the music contained here. Stylistically, it’s tight and cogent, and there’s a flow to it, too, which begins with the appropriately-titled ‘Intro’, which is precisely that – a short instrumental intro piece which paves the way for the ten heavyweight cuts which follow. But within that coherence, what Tramontane offers is a work which really goes all-out to disrupt and unsettle.

‘Niello’ draws primarily on the sound and style of earlier industrial music, the electronic pioneers of the late 70s and early 80s, the likes of DAF and Cabaret Voltaire, but with its distorted, menacing vocals, there’s an element of the later evolutions of industrial which emerged in the mid 80s. It seems to be that there are very different understandings of industrial, and while Al Jourgensen may be a huge fan of William Burroughs and the music that formed the body of the first wave of Industrial music, namely Throbbing Gristle and also the wild tape loop works of Foetus and the heavy percussion of Test Dept, it’s industrial metal and harsh post-NIN electronica which have come to become synonymous with industrial latterly.

On Tramontane, Kadaitcha have brought the two forms, old and new, together, and the result is discordant, noisy, difficult. And these are its selling points. It feels like a guided tour through the most challenging aspects of Industrial music through its evolution and history.

‘Knife’ is a sparse, oppressive low-end throb pinned down by a dull, thudding, muffled-sounding beat, over which twitching electrical streams flash and flow while monotone vocals are unsettlingly detached. The percussion really dominates on the tempestuous ‘Liars’ and any and all references to Einstürzende Neubauten are entirely appropriate. It’s a thunderous, dense racket where the low end really stands to the fore, but it’s tame in comparison to the dark ‘Offering’: even when it drives out as a heavy and insistent bass riff, it feels unfinished, undercomposed. Yet therein lies its success: it feels organic, and nothing is overdone.

The mangled noise and droning distorted vocal on ‘Fossil’ is pure Throbbing Gristle, a barrelling barrage of blitzkrieg laser synth bleeps and a whole mess of midrange and lower end distortion and dirt, churning, discordant, the monotone vocals almost buried in the tempest of overloading unpleasantness, and ‘Seeds’ is similarly unpleasant and uncomfortable, everything going all out on overdrive.

It all comes together on ‘Insight’: beginning as a gentle, spacious, mellow post-rock guitar-led piece, it soon erupts into a mess of overload akin to Metal Machine Music, only with drums and sinister vocals. It’s got the lot, and as the album enters its final stages, it seems to consolidate the elements of the previous tracks to punch even harder, with the percussion harder, the grinding morass denser and darker.

Perhaps a reflection of the circumstances in which it was created, perhaps a reflection of the times in the world at large, Tramontane is heavy and at times harrowing. The lyrics may not be decipherable for the most part, but the mood requires no translation or interpretation, and Tramontane will crush your soul.

AA

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kadaitcha – fracture

Posted: 8 February 2022 in Singles and EPs
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ant-zen – 4th February 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Increasingly, when the consumption of music and art in general has become increasingly focused on accessibility, ease of consumption, and essentially a trade in intangibles – many no longer own any music physically, and simply stream everything – there is, conversely, a keen hankering and a strong, if niche, market for artefacts. Having grown up with first vinyl, and then CDs myself, I get this. The idea of not actually ‘owning’ your collection is bewildering, and the fact is that a playlist is not a collection. What happens when a subscription site folds, or when an artist withdraws their work from your platform of choice? Even bands who host their own music on sites like bandcamp, can withdraw or delete it at any time.

I’m no fan of MP3, but at least with an MP3, you’ve got something (although it pays to back up, or you might not). But with a true physical format, apart from fire or flooding, you have something pretty robust. But that’s not even half of it. It’s about the experience. The object. I can still recall when and where or how I came to acquire a large percentage of my collection, which runs well into the thousands of records and CDs (but no longer tapes, so much, for various reasons).

With the vinyl renaissance well under way, the late-cut single is very much a growth area. These things aren’t cheap, but what pressing plant is going to do a dozen copies? Meanwhile, a lot of artists with small fanbases still want something physical, but it would likely take then several lifetimes to shift a couple of hundred or more units. And then there’s storing the things. No-one wants boxes of unsold inventory they’ve paid a fortune for filling the spare room. And so, those who want something to cherish and simply own are generally happy to pay that bit more for something intrinsically scarce.

Kadaitcha’s latest, ‘fracture’ comes as a square lathe-cut 7”, which looks like one heck of an item, and of course, digital download, and contains two heavyweight slabs of dense, thunderous noise.

‘night’ is a crunchy, doom-laden drone driven by industrial-strength percussion. The guitars buzz and the vocals growl, almost submerged beneath the dense, murky noise; the beats blast like the heaviest machinery known to man. It’s like a black metal Swans. Flipside ‘rekill’ places the electronic to the fore, sounding like a JG Thirlwell remix of Nine Inch Nails with stuttering blasts and walls of digital distortion exploding from the speakers. It’s overloading, everything all at once, an instant headache distilled and amplified. This, of course, means I absolutely love it. Feel the pain.

AA

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