It is easy to get entrained on these beats, and they have just the right level of aggression to appease fans of noise and post-industrial music as they would those who are just in it for the pure power of the pulse that hits like a lightweight spinning a punching bag.
Pounding, abrasive, and full of rhythmic vitality
Limits can be a good thing. Working at a library, I get to see a lot of forgettable self-help books that that talk about “unlimited” potential, and a lot of forgettable business books that talk about “unlimited” progress. They seem to have forgotten that if we didn’t have limits at the edges of our bodies, we’d just be blobs of biological goop. These business bros seem to forget that endless growth can leave an enterprise overstretched and thin on the ground. Meanwhile as a society we are running to our limits, as the resource base of our fossil fuels gets depleted. Our energies are all in limited supply, personally and collectively. It is therefore useful to think about limits. Aesthetically, we see the beauty of limits at work in architecture, in nature, and art. The architect György Doczi set this view forth in his essential book The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art, and Architecture.
I think it is just as essential to set limits within musical compositions. Sommerfeld have done that on their release Expansion. Having limits doesn’t imply a lack of growth, as shown here. In fact it can channel growth in specific directions. Limits create forms and the forms created on this blitzkrieg of an EP are channeled with relentless force by the use of minimal ingredients.
These tracks are pounding, abrasive, and full of rhythmic vitality. Another limit they chose was the length of the work. By setting this up as an EP the propulsive fuel of these churning beats doesn’t get old and the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It is easy to get entrained on these beats, and they have just the right level of aggression to appease fans of noise and post-industrial music as they would those who are just in it for the pure power of the pulse that hits like a lightweight spinning a punching bag. The energy, so concentrated, is dynamic upon release. Small is beautiful and less is more.
“This record is all just drum machines and distortion. It’s been an adventure seeing how these elements alone can shape our music. We wanted to see how far we could push it and that was pretty far!” ~Sommerfeld
Expansion is available on Ryu. [Bandcamp]
