Kinit Her – The Poet & The Blue Flower (Vinyl, LP) Label: Avant! – AV!025 Format: Vinyl, LP, Limited Edition, Grey Country: Italy Released: 15 Jul 2013 Style: Experimental, Neofolk, Industrial
Through kaleidoscopic composition, constitution of voice, and timbral experimentation, Nathaniel Ritter and Troy Schafer continue to braid their string of works as Kinit Her. Their discography has grown strong over recent years with releases on such esteemed labels as Alt.Vinyl, Small Doses, Pesanta Urfolk, Reue um Reue, and now, AVANT!; this repertoire has become a powerful force that is harmoniously reliable and unpredictable in theme, atmosphere, and trajectory. On The Poet & the Blue Flower, Schafer and Ritter endure in architecting a unique system of auditory mysticism. Falling in an undefinable territory of the post-industrial and neofolk landscapes with both strictly structured song-like fragments and more free-associative passages throughout its 8 tracks, this album features the exalted rhetoric that is Schafer’s stoic orchestral arrangements, Ritter’s tidal electronics and the continually evolving vocal deliveries of both men.
Lyrically, The Poet & the Blue Flower continues with Kinit Her’s recent bent of drawing on poetry from Germany’s early 20th Century post-romantic literary underground. With this record, they drift slightly from Der Kosmikerkreis to the poems of literary and political philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz serving as their sole inspiration. Pannwitz’ poetry effortlessly escalates Kinit Her’s themes of the entanglement of Heaven, Earth, and those who believe to be dwelling in some intersection thereof. Visual accompaniment to Kinit Her’s music, as it was on the recent The Cavern Stanzas, has been graciously provided by the brush of Gianluca Martucci. Mastering courtesy of James Plotkin.
Coàgul, Caden – Coàgul & Cadena Label: Dead Moon Records – DMR01, Discos Enfermos, Broca, Gradual Hate Records GH 129 VN Format: Vinyl, LP, Mini-Album Country: Spain Released: 10 Nov 2016 Style: Experimental, Industrial, Noise, No Wave
Sisters and brothers: throughout our miserable lives they haven’t ceased to try to sell us all kinds of ideals by the means of all possible dialectical subterfuges. Vanquishing our will again and again. Injecting us without mercy hundreds of all sorts of viruses of obstinating idealism: those of decadence and those of excellence, those of excess and those of containment, those of partying and those of work, those of pleasure and those of sacrifice, those of life and those of death. We have kept on believing and digesting them one after the other, accepting them one by one heart on hand, only to rapidly reject each one of them and swallow the next one. But always in absolute spiritual submission to one or another higher instance that tells us what do we have to believe. That’s why once defrauded and betrayed by all the viper tongues that caressed our pineal glands, once fed up and stuffed with all the viruses of the ideal, we have come to the realization that what they were trying to sell us wasn’t anything else than ourselves. That’s why the time has come when we no longer believe nothing, when we are finally cleansed, when we finally are totally impervious to all meta-narrative seduction, when we at last find ourselves face to face with nothingness: we no longer have anything, nor we want to have anything; we no longer know nothing, nor we want to know nothing; we no longer are nothing, nor we want to be nothing. That’s why we have transformed ourselves into pure luminous electricity, that’s why we have transformed ourselves into the most absolute ideal, that’s why we are more pure and free than ever, that’s why we have the universe at our disposal: let’s celebrate it by taking its fruits with total disafection.
In Summer 2015, these two industrial music acts from Barcelona decided to join their forces to produce a series of songs specifically conceived to be played for first and last time during the third edition of Cønjuntø Vacíø festival. Formed in 2015, CADENA is a three-piece combo refreshing the hardcore punk and industrial rock traditions, and distilling them into a saturated and contemporary sound that is close to the most plastic-like noise rock. COÀGUL is the single-member project of an unclassifiable character who, from 2009 onwards has been taking back the rythm’n’noise sound of Esplendor Geometrico-like acts, translating it into a certain lyrical drive that brings him closer to the lands of folk music rather than those of the noise music into which it’s so easy to pigeonhole him. For this occasion, the two acts shaked their hands in their common soils: the obsession for urban space, contemporary dystopia and an active nihilism that connects the suburbs with cosmos. From the work done were born seven songs that were firstly played live at the festival —becoming a corrosive experience which, by the means of noise, light and relational performance art, exhausted the senses of the audience and deprogrammed it’s behaviour— to be later recorded at the studio in the days after. With lyrics in Catalan, more than an album this is a document that cartographies a contextual micro-particle key to understand the hidden details of Barcelona’s underground. The release of these songs in LP format has been fruit of the cooperative work between four labels: Dead Moon Records, Discos Enfermos, Broca Records and GH Records.
Dead Moon Records + Discos Enfermos + Broca + GH Records
Hermanas y Hermanos: a lo largo de nuestras miserables vidas no nos han parado de intentar vender todo tipo de ideales mediante todos los subterfugios dialécticos posibles. Doblando nuestra voluntad una y otra vez. Inoculándonos sin piedad centenares de virus de idealismo recalcitrante de la más diversa índole: los de la decadencia y los del excelencia, los del exceso y los de la contención, los de la fiesta y los del trabajo, los del placer y los del esfuerzo, los de la vida y los de la muerte. Nos los hemos ido creyente y digiriendo el uno detrás el otro, aceptándolos uno a uno con el corazón en la mano, para después renegar enseguida y tragarnos rápidamente el siguiente. Pero siempre en absoluta sumisión espiritual a una instancia o la otra superior que nos dice el que tenemos que creer.
Por eso, un golpe estafados y traicionados por todas las lenguas de serpiente que nos han mimado la glándula pineal, un golpe empachados y embutidos con todos los virus del ideal, nos hemos dado cuenta de qué el que nos estaban intentando vender no era sino a nosotros mismos. Por eso, ha llegado la hora en que ya no nos creemos nada, en que ya estamos definitivamente depurados, en que ya somos totalmente impermeables a toda seducción meta-narrativa, en que por fin nos encontramos frente a frente con la nada: ya no tenemos nada, ni queremos tener nada; ya no sabemos nada, ni queremos saber nada; ya no somos nada, ni queremos ser nada. Por eso nos hemos convertido en pura electricidad luminosa, por eso nos hemos convertido nosotros mismos en el ideal más absoluto, por eso somos más puros y entregas que nunca, por eso tenemos el universo a nuestra disposición: celebrémoslo tomando sus frutos con total desafección.
Arche-Fossil (Cønjuntø Vacíø, 2020) is Wind Atlas’ fourth record, which sees the band pushing the boundaries of their own music as genres such as post-industrial electronics, ambient, noise and popular mediterranean music merge, bringing to life a hybrid and intense album.
The gestation process of Arche-Fossil began even before the publication of An Edible Body (2018). With that record, the band changed members and ventured into more electronic territories by using drum machines and synths that still fit their ritual post-punk sound. After two years spent working on this new record, these electronic landscapes have taken over their music.
Arche-Fossil was almost entirely recorded by themselves at their home studio and finished at Maik Mayer’s recording studio with Sergio Pérez. It collects the songs that represent the band’s work over the last two years and that best reflect the issues that weave the whole record regarding the relationship between human beings and reality. Is it possible to know an uninterpretable reality? What is knowing? How does the relationship between human beings and reality work? These questions inform a series of songs that produce a voice that continuously muses on what it perceives and the ways in which it does.
Hunger opens the record amidst a thunder of abstract sounds and a viscous bass loop. By using samples from M. E. S. H.’s “Optimate”, which forms the noisy basis of the song, Hunger approaches more experimental electronic terrains. This song revolves not only around an insatiable and uninhibited hunger for finding new ways of saying and being in the world, but also around an enormous emptiness.
The monumental track Where Nothing Happens explores empty spaces and everything that happens within them when something–a step, a voice, an object–interrupts their eternal being, thus generating new meanings between these spaces and that which suddenly inhabits them.
In Dos Ojos, the band continues navigating electronic landscapes, this time through Spanish traditional and oral literature. They follow this path further in Esta Despedida, where the vocals use one single sentence to unsay: “Todos los nombres van a morir a ti.” (“You are where all names go to die”) From then onwards, the vocals employ a form of glossolalia as a tool to continue uttering after the death of meaning that they have previously announced. Likewise, Days of Sadness, a free adaptation of Galician poet José Ángel Valente’s poem “Latitud”, pays homage to the language of the unsaid, which has heavily influenced Wind Atlas’ discourse over the years.
That Mouth emerges as a dramatic effect when the record has managed to hypnotize us. Trance and an industrial sound meet amidst MS20 roars and a beat going over 140bpm. Metallic blows and the sound of chains burst in, creating rhythmic patterns over a bass drum that pushes forward.
The eeriest and most beautiful moments appear on the record’s B-side. Such moments come to life in tracks like Oceanic Sexuality or the closer Do You Have a House?, along with the experimental Nada, in which, by only utilizing noise, Wind Atlas create a sonic collage poem that draws from power-electronics. Here, some of the band’s recurring themes reemerge: emptiness, water, and the body.
In Arche-Fossil, Wind Atlas continue exploring some of the paths they began mapping with their previous record. This time, however, they manage to approach the heterogeneous in a much more certain and lucid manner, without ever stopping wondering about their own voice.
Andrea P. Latorre: vocals Sergi Algiz: electronics and guitar Raúl Q. de Orte: Synths Raul Pérez: drums
Recorded by the band and final recordings at Maik Maier Studios (Barcelona) by Sergio Pérez. Mixed by Sergio Pérez and mastered by Stephen Quinn at Analogue Heart (UK). Art photos by Àlex Sardà. Artwork by David M. Romero.
