Adzer is a collaborative tape with its fingers in quite a few pies. It's boldly broad in its content. But where broadness can sometimes deaden a release, Adzer shines.
We hover above soundscapes, no floor beneath our feet; observing from a dispassionate, unplaceable viewpoint. Organic and inorganic rhythms collide and collude. Paranoiac loops flitter by, switching between themselves restlessly. It's the audio equivalent of Gaspar Noé's Into the Void; unpredictable, scuzzy and overwhelming.
We are hovering over indistinct scenes. We arrive after they begin, we leave before they end.
Various techniques are employed to evoke this sense of movement. Bardo Todol brings concrète, field recordings of the mundane suffused with uncanny metallic friction (think the crying which opens Boris' ‘Buzz-In’). M. M. Peres' hosts bells and chimes, and approaches the joyful transcendence and hypnagogia of spiritual jazz. Úgjü Sectas stabs at classic, Parmegiani-style acousmatic chaos. Glitchy elements crash the work, with elegance, into the present day.
But greater than the individual achievements of this releases' contributors is its overall cohesion. What could easily have lacked direction instead cleaves its path straight to the sublime. This is a patchwork of many colours, waiting for you to wrap yourself in it.
Adzer is available for purchase and streaming here. An accompanying short film is also available here.
Words by Andrew O’Keefe