(12.22.06) Yet another reason to love the ever fascinating Ad Noiseam label is how the artists are allowed room to grow. Zak Roberts, a.k.a. Cdatakill, has made his name over the last few years by grinding up the breakcore scene (with two previous records on Ad Noiseam, as well as releases on Zhark, Low Res, and Eupholus) and yet, with Valentine, he’s jettisoned most of that furious staccato beat work for something truly elegant and beautiful. Diving deep into the trip-hop dub, Roberts’ Valentine is an evolutionary left turn that brings all manner of new life to moribund structures.
“You Are Mine,” for example, is the best Muslimgauze track I’ve heard in several years. Really. It is creepy how Roberts has taken some of the Bryn Jones’ rhythms and timbres and built something so referential yet still so alien. The bass lines and the echo of dusty record grooves shimmer like early ’90s period Muslimgauze while the looping vocal track snaps the mood forward to some of Jones’ later experiments. If the rest of Valentine turned out to be nothing more than a tribute album, that would have been fine, but Roberts pauses here, lost in vibrant rhythms and dust-storm grit of the Middle East, for just a moment before spiralling off into other territories.
A ghost of Billie Holliday anchors “Yesterdays” in an juke joint opiate haze. Her voice is unraveled into a series of shivering echoes, a cascade of half-formed vowels that tumbles over slippery percussion and electrified synthesizer melodies. “No Brakes” opens with a nihilistic warning–“The car has no brakes and we’re flooring it; we’re going to hit something, and so what?”–before hurling itself into a howling haze of looping Persian vocals, phantasmal piano melodies, and dark-hop rhythms. “Nefertiti Dub” swirls with phantom reeds, a loop of woodwind melody that has been lost for many generations until it has been rediscovered by this gentle dub sandstorm. From somewhere else, the storm has collected the last performance of a string orchestra playing from the deck of a doomed river barge while the storm’s electrical discharges coalesce as spurts of metal guitar noise.
“Raining Glass” lumbers between elegant trip-hop and doom-laded dark-hop, with fine diamond melodies strewn in the lugubrious substrata stomp; while the distress signals of “Tornado Sirens” moan and writhe beneath a flickering strata of glassine percussion. The closer, “Arapahoe Country Sunset,” is filled with the warped tones of a spaghetti western guitar (via Dead Hollywood Stars’ re-imagining of the cinematic western soundtrack) and a percussive chaos reminiscent of Winterkälte beating up Amon Tobin for his breaks. Roberts ends Valentine by wrapping a homage to the furious breakcore of his past around an atmospheric evocation of future possibilities.
Magnus Blomster’s original artwork references Audrey Beardsley’s gothic ethereality, and it encapsulates both the phantasmal delirium and the decadent distress of Cdatakill’s music. If Valentine is a love letter, then its intended recipient is the soul that believes in both angels and monsters, love and disaster, pain and redemption. Very highly recommended.
Valentine is out now on Ad Noiseam. Buy it at Amazon.com
