Gesamkunstwerk this isn’t, and it doesn’t try to be. Recommended if you’re in the mood for a journey continuously laid out by hand and machine, no smoke or mirrors.
Live twiddling and adjusting of parameters
As an artist, Anna Martinova is nothing but generous. Between her two main musical projects, her school of modular synthesis, sample packs, and regular live performing, it seems like her musical journey is one of giving. After her odyssean release earlier this year on Detroit Underground, Dissolution of Ego (as Dusha) she brings it back to a raw, improvised tech mood on Checks Cashed on TruthTable.
Checks Cashed consists of four tracks described as minimal techno improvisations on a modular system. This is very much accurate. In all of the tracks you can feel the live twiddling and adjusting of parameters. In the opener, “Dear,” you hear (and therefore see) Tulpa’s finger playing with the tape-like delay and the bitcrusher essential to the sound of that track.
The necessarily limited nature of a modular system (compared to a computer, at least) gives to these tracks a hard-hitting but stripped-down feeling. This is especially heard on “Bahia,” which does not use any of the effects or pads of the other pieces. “Bahia” is just a fourteen-minute minimal techno set, all perc-y, filter-y, with only some vocal sample manipulation intervening in the latter half of the track. On the contrary, the next piece, “Checks Cashed,” brings more melodic fluidity and liquid lines, with a fun polymeter of 7 over 4. Overall, the last two tracks bring in more atmosphere, reverb and ambient-like sounds, whereas the first two tracks bask in their sonic sparsity.
Gesamkunstwerk this isn’t, and it doesn’t try to be. Recommended if you’re in the mood for a journey continuously laid out by hand and machine, no smoke or mirrors.
Checks Cashed is available on TruthTable.
