Review: AU79 - Opiłki i Makrostruktury

I’m in a gigantic metal dumpster in the pitch black, surrounded by all of those sounds deemed too garish or abrasive to fulfil the ruthless checklist of popular dance music. They roll over me and eachother, drumming reverberantly against the walls: hobbling electronic glissandos (the digital equivalent of nails dragged down a blackboard), the staccato announcements of submarine sonar, weird slugs of bass oozing across the floor of stereo space. Not only are these sounds too abnormal in timbre, but they recklessly disobey the laws of quantised electronic rhythm, dribbling outside of their 4/4 confines and slurring beats like invertebrate drunks. The nightclubs won’t have them, but AU79 will.

Opiłki i Makrostruktury harnesses its musicality through sheer accident. It’s melodic in a manner that a car engine might be, full of hums and harmonics, expelling air out of lungs made from rusted metal tubes. Similarly, it obeys the rhythms of artificial cyclical mechanisms (clock hands, assembly line machinery) rather than those that endeavour to enflame the desire to dance – the fourth track is a tribal dubstep if you really squint, rocked by the chaos of copper wind chimes, fogged by toxic ambience. The more I listen, the less I have to go searching for these glints of conventional musical reference point. Just as my eyes adjust to the darkness of the dumpster, my body acclimatises to AU79’s sense of timing and sound placement until my limbs start to sway all by themselves.