STURQUEN
- piranha
(CD,
kvitnu)
When I was a kid Piranha were regarded as the most
dangerous small fish in the world. Put your hand into a piranha infested
river and a second later you draw it back out with not a single speck of
flesh left on your bones. Piranha are able to devour a cow within thirty
seconds. That sort of horror movie biology facts. Even though all of this is
fascinatingly exaggerated, there are more facts in these sentences than are
known about Sturquen. But who cares? In techno - and whatever you may say,
techno is the musical genre this is closest to, which is still pretty far
away – anonymity and mystery around personas are very important. So take
it for what it is: beats.
Heavy, deep, bass-ridden, synthetic beats, polished and
reduced to the max and then put onto one another to form tracks that are
both hypnotic in their driving force as they are disturbing in their
sparseness. I bet this will drive reviewers in techno magazines crazy, as
they are looking for ways to describe this in their minimalist range of
possible expressions. Because, paradoxically, to the limited range of means
used, the range of the outcome is spaceous. The music ranges from industrial
to the good old Detroit crazyness to a warbling, distorted dub to a sort of
4/4 on the floor weirdness that would eradicate any rave dance floor.
Don’t mistake this for a collection of rhythms for techno mixers, because
even though the tracks themselves are quite short, they change and mutate
quite a lot while they last. Which is another deadly sin in big rave hall
techno.
I think it is the spaces between the beats that is so
important here and makes “piranha” outstanding. In regular techno these
spaces are filled with layers of stupid keyboards or vocal samples going
“oooh-aaah shake your butt” or something likewise dumb. Here, the only
thing filling the vacuum is the echoes of the beats themselves. A lonely hi
hat hit on the four is as close as it gets to a melodic fill. Yet, sometimes
there is noise, but this is also used as a percussive element. And one more
important thing: expectations – forget about them. As soon as you form
one, Sturquen will add something to destroy your expectation. “K2N” for
instance, gets as close to a regular techno beat as possible here, but the
hi hat is somewhat out of sync with the 4/4 double bass and that destroys
any headbanging quite easily. And moreover, the track constantly changes.
Some words have to be lent to the excellent design of
the cover. An odd-shaped, multi-folded cardboard with what seems to be
self-evolving graphic elements that, when you look at them, start to move,
split and dance with the beats of the music. Done by Zavoloka, who is
probably programming her own music with these kinds of shapes. Something
like this cannot be downloaded. And even while I am starting to digitalize
my collection of CDs (because they are getting just too many to keep them
all in their proper shape) and I am starting to think about the effect that
it will have on my listening and perception of music, when it is stripped
off all visual additions and is left to its plain impact on mp3, a cover
like this will make think twice before giving it away.
