V/A :: CRACKS (Lost Children Net Label)

Across the fourteen tracks, CRACKS rejects reducing human suffering to mere political rhetoric or grandiose powerplay spectacles. Instead, the musical and tonal dissonance and innate musical human tenderness become a language of resistance, demonstrating how experimental music such as here can bear witness to the ills of vulnerable people’s once seen as commodities.

A shared political urgency

 

Canada’s Lost Children Net Label assembles fourteen experimental artists whose explorations of dub techno, bass music, noise, found sound, urban captures and guitar refrains converge around a shared political urgency. Featuring Detroit’s DeForrest Brown Jr. as Speaker Music, Joni Void, Kate Carr’s profound suite “saturday actions” and a constellation of lo-fi, hi-rez contributors, this compilation confronts the human consequences of borders, deportation and migration without sacrificing the unruly spirit of experimentation.

On apartment m52’s “i would die for anything, maybe,” fractious, tender tones parry as a fragmenting female voice laments through scratches, evoking the invisibility of lives rendered expendable by divisive political manipulation and the financial interests it serves. Hamza Lahmadi and Anas Hejam offer beautiful acoustic instrumental paeans to communities subjected to increasingly dehumanizing immig​ration policies, whose electoral expediency comes at the expense of long-standing, harmonious social bonds. Elsewhere, thenewobjective, featuring Cole Pulice, deliver “Scylla and Charybdis,” a brooding industrial cavalcade of drone, mood and tension, its shifting sonic architecture evoking the impossible choices confronting those caught between hostile forces.

Across the fourteen tracks, the compilation rejects reducing human suffering to mere political rhetoric or grandiose powerplay spectacles. Instead, the musical and tonal dissonance and innate musical human tenderness become a language of resistance, demonstrating how experimental music such as here can bear witness to the ills of vulnerable people’s once seen as commodities.

CRACKS is available on Lost Children Net Label. [Bandcamp]