II Worlds is steeped is a narrative. These tracks depict far-off planets, ghoulish creatures and inhospitable atmospheres. Amidst the industrial thunder and caustic showers are islands of tranquillity, refuges from the electro onslaught. A musical world, a world of The Exaltics.
The rise of electro has been a curious one. Rather than one specific artist or label blazing the trail, the appreciation of the colder side of the machine music spectrum has developed through a number of different entities and imprints. One musician who has been at the coalface of this revival has been Robert Witschakowski and his output under the mask of The Exaltics.
Returning to Clone West Coast Series (Clone sub-label), five years since the Some Other Place series, II Worlds is the Jena-based producer’s seventh album since 2008. The years may have passed, but to a certain degree the audio message has remained constant; razor sharp rhythms and frigid funk. That constant is plain to hear in “Fallen Star,” a track blending astral bleep with serrated beat patterns. There is an underlying threat to this album, a menace that comes to the fore in the slashing snares and dissected speech of “The Others” and in the ghostly movements on the unnerving “One.” Other pieces stalk, seeking out with violent intent as in the aptly named “Tunnel Chase” and “Skyway Chase.” “The Hunt Is On” is cast in the same unsettling tones, sci-fi trills and lancing rhythms keeping time as beastly basslines trudge ever closer. There are respites to the relentless intensity and it is in these moments that another side of Witschakowski’s sound can be heard. Take “Symbionts Came Through The Green Lights”, an alien world dipped in aluminium and eerie resonance, or the juddering ambience of “439.” The final piece returns to the depth and introspection of Some Other Place. Twinkling notes sparkle in the darkness of muddy baselines in “8000 Miles High.”
II Worlds is steeped is a narrative. These tracks depict far-off planets, ghoulish creatures and inhospitable atmospheres. Amidst the industrial thunder and caustic showers are islands of tranquillity, refuges from the electro onslaught. A musical world, a world of The Exaltics.
II Worlds is available on Clone West Coast Series.
