Everything about the sound design and palette of Window To Askoy seems suspended in the heat of summer rains and tropical smog. Yet it’s the soulful element that’s paramount: an exquisite melancholy and blessed-out bliss shape the ventricles and vessels of these lean cuts.
Exquisite melancholy and blessed-out bliss
Zoku – Zoku maintain the altitude of their own exciting frequencies alongside the heights and depths of the frankly awesome Strugatsky Brothers album Window To Askey. Atmosphere is the key ingredient here. There is beauty, tenderness and a sense of wisdom and maturity visible beneath an overt display of technique.
The realms created are dub-heavy in tension and color, occasionally recalling Bvdub, but this isn’t intended as a direct comparison. The brothers (Stas Kovalev, aka Keiss) are clearly distinct, yet that fugue-like quality and deftness of hand is apparent throughout. Rain features, reverbs write verbs across low-hung bass, while beats staccato in and out of the visual field being created. Mid-range tension stutters into view only to evaporate moments later. Everything about the sound design and palette seems suspended in the heat of summer rains and tropical smog. Yet it’s the soulful element that’s paramount: an exquisite melancholy and blessed-out bliss shape the ventricles and vessels of these lean cuts.
Across ten tracks and three extras, the brothers retain interest and keep expectations poised on the edge of what’s possible next, doing so with rare panache. I might call this ambient, but that would be a lazy get-out. This is experimental electronic music wearing its influences on clean sleeves, facing forward with valor, integrity and just enough—and plenty—of both. Recommended for the ethereal textured moods of FSOL and the abstract dub’n fuzz of Jack Dangers.
Window To Askoy is available on Zoku – Zoku. [Bandcamp]
