KOTRA

Dissilient

CD, Nexsound

If you found Alexei Borisov and Anton Nikklä as too peaceful and harmonious for your taste and Kaffe Matthews a little to less lively – and I have heard of such judgements – then take the next step to Dmytro Federenko aka Kotra, who will definitely give you a good massage of the eardrums that is more to your expectations. Of course, “dissilient” is not about being rude or harsh for the sake of being rude and harsh to your hearing, after all this is not a death metal record. The art of Kotra is about expanding your ways of hearing sounds and music and of widening your auditive perception to new and yet unheard of ways of frequencies interchanging. With a carbon-steamdrill, if necessary, I should add.

Warning should be given to anyone who is prone to experiencing nausea when confronted with high-pitched frequencies that smoulder and feep your senses, cut up and intermixed with white noise, static and interferences that come from experimentations with electrical current on an almost primordial basis. The titles of the tracks – called either “minus”, “zero”, “plus” or “plus / minus” give away the electro-magnetic background on the purely technical side. If you get past the feeling of “that is what it must sound like when a radio falls into your bathtub” you’ll reach a wide world of truly fascinating auditive out/input. Our brains function on an electric basis mainly, with neurons acting as connectors. The same way these sounds reach the limbic system and will give you a transcendent hallucination, sickness or both.

Where does that take us? Is there a place or an imagined garden of Eden in which sounds like these will be perceived as beautiful and harmonious by the majority of the people? Or is “Dissilient” designed to drive cracks into the floor of this false paradise that betrays its inhabitants by comforting them with a cotton layer of mainstream pop music? Or is it just the lonely fascination of one strange mind that has gone over the top and fallen into an obsession with noise?

“Dissilient” offers a dangerous yet fascinating aural landscape, like watching old Sci-Fi-Movies on mangled and broken VHS-tapes on fast forward. The deeper forward you dare to get into the world of Kotra, the more complex and the less irritant the measures and motions of the sounds start to be – or the music gets less exhausting and strenuous towards the second half of the record, where some tracks offer some kind or rhythmical structure to support our hearing and perception crawl along the lines of Kotra – and the next thing is that for milliseconds the beauty of noise flashes up, then for a little longer, until you’ve reached the point of true wholeness. Then new wisdom will flare into your mind like a firework.

Or so I imagine, because up to now I haven’t managed to reach that point. To me the milliseconds of vocal samples (or what may sound like it in my now mangled perception) embedded in a pounding digital noise beat and constructed around more high frequencies (I didn't know there are so many different aspects of high pitch) are a relief.