Lu Katavist has been an eager sound navigator for some good years by now, even if he might not be such a known character on the dreary new scene of contemporary abstract music.
Based in Cologne, Luka Höfler released his first music experiments back in 1994, with several albums under the Elfish Echo moniker out on Source Records (and its’ KM20 sublabel) and Drittland Schallscheiben. Several EPs and albums followed, some of his work being available on his bandcamp page.
‘’Inburst’’ is the debut of the Manchester imprint CUSP, which strains to championing experimental music from the hinterlands. The newborn label aims to forage new sonic territories in electronics, improvisation and beyond, with every recording being matched by in-house designer John Powell-Jones.
The seven pieces album comes as a whole, dispatching beautiful concrete-inspired music, eerie electronics, haunting and hypnotic drones, melodramatic portions of noise. Every track creates a beautiful landscape of its own, with - apparently - singular harmonies getting together into a daring sound experiment. Throughout, the album grows an impressive variety of synthesizer modules controlled with the Haken Continuum Fingerboard - a musical instrument that allows unprecedented real-time performance control, in three dimensions for every finger that is placed on the playing surface.
This music is subterranean and needs an own language. It screams for attention, but once you’re dedicated to the listening experience, you realize you can do more with this music, than just listen it - you can actually use it to build your own soundscapes. Production wise, one can easily feel a strong interest in developing an overall tension throughout the atmosphere. It sounds lovingly weird - but you don’t want to play this at your barbecue party and trip out the guests.
Drones from hidden forests; cats walking silly on the ‘needle sandwich’; matches to burn unneeded pages continuously; unattended birds; old radio waves vanished in time capsules; spatial generosity; the ridiculous sense of endless expectation; and the wakening call - fear for alienation and for the elude of itself in layers that only nature can acknowledge; where to go now? Is there any safe destination of this trip? Who knows…
‘’Inburst’’ play with machines that reveal their strange beauty in an organic approach, enriching untamed minds with dozes of sound delicacies.
Tracklist:
1. Slaft Inburst2. Drop : Zerdehnung
3. Neddle Sandwich
4. Cajolement
5. Precession
6. Undult
7. Fingerzeugung: The Coagulated Sea