Andres Lõo
Seto Dub

Editions Mego: ...Reflecting Ambarchi’s profound love of Brazilian music – an aspect of his omnivorous musical appetite not immediately apparent in his own work until now – Simian Angel features the remarkable percussive talents of the legendary Cyro Baptista, a key part of the Downtown scene who has collaborated with everyone from John Zorn and Derek Bailey to Robert Palmer and Herbie Hancock. Like the music of Nana Vasconcelos and Airto Moreira, Simian Angel places Baptista’s dexterous and rhythmically nuanced handling of traditional Brazilian percussion instruments into an unexpected musical context. On the first side, ‘Palm Sugar Candy’, Baptista’s spare and halting rhythms wind their way through a landscape of gliding electronic tones, gently rising up and momentarily subsiding until the piece’s final minutes leave Ambarchi’s guitar unaccompanied. While the rich, swirling harmonics of Ambarchi’s guitar performance are familiar to listeners from his previous recordings, the subtly wavering, synthetic guitar tone we hear is quite new, coming across at times like an abstracted, splayed-out take on the 80s guitar-synth work of Pat Metheny or Bill Frisell. Equally new is the harmonic complexity of Ambarchi’s playing, which leaves behind the minimalist simplicity of much of his previous work for a constantly-shifting play between lush consonance and uneasy dissonance.

V I S: ...The brooding cycles of Christoph De Babalon's work have never readily leant themselves to the customs of genre and function. And the shadowy mechanics of his breakbeat turbulence altogether contradict the promise that rhythm's accents resolutely sustain. Rather than winding us in along its patterned coil, setting us down in a spiral motion with the bait-and-switch of a drop, his version of hardcore is pure fight-or-flight response. Its hardest edge is its sober presentation of distress in the familiar, the totalising anguish of perceiving a threat in everything you always welcomed. This is swing as recoil.Christoph De Babalon's discography reads like a program for decoding the physiological darkside to the inhuman speed-test that hardcore first found the keys for. Set against the aching bellow of an orchestral, and almost floral, sensibility for windswept duration and exacting drone-tactics, there's no sleep for the raver and no mantle for the chin-stroker.'Grim Zenith' cuts a sharp figure in Christoph De Babalon's oeuvre. With a menacing propulsion, there's a certain pace across his new EP that keeps the cryptic, rapid-fire detail in a fractal constellation of fallout. High definition despair arcs through high-tensile ambient passages, and swarming synthetic platforms gather around the agitated strings that close each side of the record.Released in a numbered edition of 300 copies, this fifth record from V I S is a crucial dose from one of the most unrelenting practices to have been founded in the rarely shared vessel between experimental music and hardcore. That this nexus should elicit such a gothic poetics is singularly Christoph De Babalon's program.