Cernlab returns with a shuffle of tinnitus and crepitus, sawtooth kinesis and electrical grounding tones on a quest for accidental form and errorist structure.
Electroton has been active for five years now, with Martin Weiss the artificial intelligent design behind recovery of a Teutonic glitch tradition gone AWOL, pace Raster Noton. Dealers in Mille Plateaux, Ritornell, et al. saw its stock decline and fall, but Nürnberg’s smart post-clicks’n’cut cookies came late in the day with a low spec to the hi-tech Chemnitz model, taking on the torch with a small [im]perfectly formed cast of algorithm method tone triggerers and CD skippers. Among their ranks find Ukraine’s finest, Cernlab, whose Atomherz is the latest micro-scape to fall within our scope.
Flashing a calling card of post-Kraftwerkian (‘I am because I calculate’) and plastic stochastic (‘there would be boredom without error‘) tenets, the man known to his Mutti as Marek Slipek, is a shoo-in for the house style. Last heard on 2009’s 52.09 serving up pre-fab slabs of cold meat-puppet funk with bass-blown synth prod and twilight zone tones, Cernlab returns with a shuffle of tinnitus and crepitus, sawtooth kinesis and electrical grounding tones on a quest for accidental form and errorist structure. Remote dub and bass traces are evident amid a timbre-land of bitcrush, crackle, and sharp signal-noise. Its four tracks let recursive splice’n’dice loose or pulled tight to make tense and nervous play, notable among which are “Vietnamsugar,” which brings a rumpy pump of 4/4 to bear for a stick-figure mnml Schaffel harkback with more than a whiff of old Cologne (cf. Herr Voigt’s Studio 1 and Profan) and a title track that smacks of alien acid hiphop.
Ultimately, Cernlab proceeds via a lo-res wheezy glistening clunky cliphop variant. The holy trinity of 101/909/303 may be the key, Slipek’s Muse’s slip showing under an update of the Roland machine lexicon (mis)handled with Verkehr. Overall, though, the vision at the heart of Atomherz trades the dystopian default toward which such concepts tend for more intriguingly ambiguous atmos, providing testament to and restatement of post-modern minimal electronica.
Atomherz is available on Electroton.
