Review: Stoscha – Klink
Klink is an electronic music compilation. It’s also a strange day out in a future metropolis. The buildings – gigantic, vibrantly coloured tower blocks – are constantly reshaping and shuffling around the city. They respond to accommodate transient human interest by reconfiguring their own architecture, rendered in digital bricks that dialogue with, and react to, every passing inclination of its population. Electronic textures dominate this set of pieces. Some are pliable and soft, bending and depressing to fit the contours of human form (manipulated strands of voice), with chords drooping into the low pitches and contracting into tight, abrupt balls of harmonic. Others are rigid and angular, with rhythms like giant girders welded together. The passing of time is just as malleable. During the viscerally rhythmic pieces, I’m throttled by the clock. During the stretches of beatless abstraction, I’m rolled off the lip of space-time and left to drift. Solid surfaces evaporate, then condense back into mirrored pools. Digital air conditioning. Haptic synthesisers. Klink listens to me and rebuilds accordingly.
The compilation swings back and forth across the spectrum of material form. The opening track by Petit Singe sits at the right-angled end of the spectrum – glass smashing against concrete quantised beats, with flutes and mantric chants seeping in and out through an open window. Axel Willner is the ideal counterbalance: like someone depicting the dial-up modem tone in the clouds, spanning across the sky and melting under the solar backlight, swerving through a melodic pattern that defies all sense of beginnings and ends. We move abruptly into Host Stewart’s “Noordwal (Lil Lyfe)” and return to the world of rigidity; this time it’s driven by the cardiovascular pump of an aerobic class, with a pitched-down Jane Fonda dictating a rather grim routine of robot thrusts and digitised gym grunts. Air Max ’97 is a treacle of synthesiser flutes – with a firehose flail of manipulated voices sprouting out of it, forever getting jammed in the connection drops of a shoddy WiFi – while Guenter Råler tries to process numerous modes of passing time (gentle swings, staggering syncopations, jangling triplets) into begrudging coexistence, with synth pads tumbling onto the floor like dropped coins, hi-hats like shivering teeth and beats punched into the wrong places. Finally, rkss and TOLE’s digital exploration of the numerous vibration modes of two brands of dildo – a panting, buzzing collage of engine acceleration and infinite rebound – acts as a curiously apt conclusion to a compilation that, in its traversal of shape and material state, adapts beautifully in its mode of execution to fulfil the mercuriality of human need.
