Ultimately, all five of Cymma’s exhibits can be seen as tooled with a similar glitch-driven hyper-funk sensibility, and, with varying degrees of precision, incision and/or remotion, in Cymma Electroton delivers a well conceived and coherent, if uncomfy, set further establishing a fidelity for (gl)lo-fi glitch.
From beyond the valley of the ultra-digitalists, Electroton, comes Cymma, an adjunct to Bektop, a joint release with Mille Plateaux (reviews) by Kabutogani. It collects remoulds of Frenchman Jerome Berthelot’s original tracks from kindred spirits, of whom Sogar is the highest profile. In fact, Electroton-meister, (Thomas) Weiss is the only other recognizable name, for this reviewer, among the rest—names being Absent, incite/, and Dust Engineering Ltd. Still, their translations of Bektop are distinguished enough, delivered in Electroton’s Nuremberger variant of a basic tonal vocabulary whose etymology and semantics may be traced to Frankfurt and Cheimnitz—out of Mille Pateaux) via Raster-Noton.
It comes, incidentally, at a time when a digital errorist glitch manifesto has just recently been revisited and reasserted by major practitioner-theorist of errormancy, Kim Cascone. Jurgen Heckel adheres closely to its fundamental tenets in a discreet take on a template familiar to post-digital natives from early Sogar outings on 12k with its manipulations of source matter into brittle bits and warm textures, sussurating harmonics in spatial oscillations. The crepitating drone lyricism of “Book Gills remix” looks to New York more than Cheimnitz with a microsonic mien redolent of millenium-period 12k, the likes of Shuttle 358 and (early) Taylor Deupree; bleaker, though, and if a smidge of Raster-Noton jumping is admitted, it’s a less pumping strain than a Bretschneider, maybe closer to a downtempo Byetone or a leaner Kangding Ray. It nods towards less alienated areas of a notional slow-dancefloor, however remotely, while other reworkers mainly deal in more freeze-dried versions—sci-fi noir scenes and hi-tech dystopian dance routines. Yannick Donet and Frederic Bailly take to the remixing desk as Absent initially with a disarmingly calm if metallic micro-overture before turning the parts excised from Bekop’s “Ducts” into a bass-bothering glitch mutant with a radically reanimating power surge; their “Proposition 3 rmx” fizzes with a roiling industrial scrim of queasy mood-swinging atop cyber-orchestral manoeuvres in the dark. Hamburg-based duo incite/ trail their identity as purveyors of ‘immersive audio-visual live performances and quasi-danceable glitches bridging art and club,’ and though their remould of “Peripheric” comes sprayed with a caustic grime heavy-duty enough to efface all but the most twitchy of body imperatives, it’s not so contaminated out as to compromise a certain remotely induced internal funk-churn. Which brings us nicely to Dust Engineering Ltd, nom de disque of the formerly higher profile re:mote induction enterprise’s Peter Morrison, who takes liberties with “Clave (Wrong),” letting things deconstructively lurch into a timbral limbo of fragmenting wrongness. Finally, Weiss takes it to die Brücke with a series of static smears and pitched peeps, his “Protocole Weiss” an inarticulate speech, seemingly of device noise, sequenced into an eloquent restricted code of twitching funk discourse, reference with in-text citations of Alva-Noto. Ultimately, all five of Cymma’s exhibits can be seen as tooled with a similar glitch-driven hyper-funk sensibility, and, with varying degrees of precision, incision and/or remotion, in Cymma Electroton delivers a well conceived and coherent, if uncomfy, set further establishing a fidelity for (gl)lo-fi glitch.
Cymma Is available now from Electroton. Buy at Zero Inch.
