Album: Ziúr - Antifate

It’s funny how the most high tech music can sound very traditional. In the case of producer / instrumentalist / occasional singer Ziúr, it’s the tradition of her hometown of Berlin that is expressed in her whirrs, clangs and mutated voices.

Here – as on her previous records with British labels Planet Mu and Objects Limited and Canada’s Infinite machine, and like most of the roster of her new home, Berlin’s PAN – the sound palette is hyper-detailed: glistening, crackling and booming with the kind of abyssal vastness and obsessional detail that only today’s processing power can generate. But for all that, these tracks exist in a long tradition of transgressive music of the demi-monde that goes through industrial music, all the way back to Weimar cabaret. 

Indeed, Antifate is a kind of psychedelic cabaret. It’s conceived as an allegorical story about the medieval utopia of Cockaigne – a place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of medieval peasant life does not exist. It’s definitely not music of comfort, though: the tonality is that of industrial music going right back to before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Discord, clanging, screeches and drones abound – but it’s also got a lurching musicality to it, a rough and punky welcoming sense of tomfoolery if your threshold for causticness and grit is high enough.

And if you do decide to brave the scouring sound, and make your way down the stairs into the show, like the Steppenwolf into the Magic Theatre, you’ll find that it is bizarrely fun. All that detail, which comes out more and more the louder you play it and the more attention you give it, makes for a really synapse-frying world, populated by demonic hosts and Muppet audience members. It sounds by turns like Autechre drinking absinthe, or Tom Waits remade in virtual reality, or Christopher Isherwood appearing in a DMT vision. Which is not to say it’s always fun... but it’s certainly, as they say, “a mood”.

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