“Night’s Highest Noon” in Chain D.L.K

It’s really difficult to sound original without falling in the basin of cliches or already heard or in the dangerous pools of stylistical nonsense, where the stable of sharks of revieweres angrily surf. This duo, named in a way whose pronunciation is pretty obscure to me, consisting of Berlin-based Andrea Koch (giving voice and a set of electronic devices and FXs) and Warszaw-based Masaya Hijikata (hitting acoustic drums on this record), invites joining to a very stimulating sonic journey, during which they overlap more or less modified vocal modulations (and sparse singing), jazzy drumming, metamorphic electronic entities. Complying with the obsession of labeling styles, I could consider their music a sort of ambient-jazz, a label that could be somehow confusing. Complying with the other obsession (sometimes necessary to render an idea of what’s going to reach your aural nerves, to be honest) of searching for some vague references, the task becomes harder to be fully fulfilled. Some puzzling rhythmical patterns, that these nice guys let collide with computational blurs as in a gargling of a prolonged mouthwash (like the one occurring over the title-track “Night’s Highest Noon”) or the way by which they juxtapose the same vocal layers to saturate the sound in a sort of spooky transmissions (really amazing the one matched to a drum-driven crescendo on “Commuters”), vaguely resembles some experiments by some Japanese avantagarde musicians of the first years of current millenium (such as Bisk or Yoshihiro Hanno). Similarly, some quiet moments over the album could resemble some ambient classics by Steve Roach or Brian Eno and other ones get closer to holy music, but speaking in general what this bipolar entity assembled over three years of recordings (between 2014 and 2016) is significantly original and interesting. Mixing in their own words “from one side Japanese martial arts, Butoh dance and quantum physics time mapping drumming; from the other one choir music, artificial philosophy and disorienting computer sampling”, the definition of their bipolar sound could be easily grabbed by skipping the tracks till track 6 to be listened before track 7, a significant sequence between the blissful standstill of “Delle Marianne” and the chaotic futuristic storm of “Regina Coel”. It’s pretty rare a debut album pleased my demanding ears like this one did.

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