Eastern Haze: December

Our December installment is no year-end retrospective overview since there are plenty of aural novelties emitted to the sonisphere courtesy of all the tireless evangelists. It is as if the failed Mayan prophecy – or is it that we are living in some kind of ersatz simulacrum of reality? – has propelled musicians and their patrons to release as much music as possible this month in the face of the impending entropy.

Piotr Kurek is one of the most acclaimed contemporary Polish musicians nowadays, with an album on Foxy Digitalis under his belt. Following a kosmische cooperation with Sylvia Monnier in Suaves Figures, he returns with a solo installment, a noodly nostalgic electronic journey this time also laden with yearning vocals. Edena is out now on tape on Sangoplasmo.

Balázs Semsei aka Norwell also follows the synth-bound trajectory, weaving a narrative through synthetic electronic territories, mellow and exploratory tangents. The youth of Budapest seem to be in thrall of tweaking the soul out of vintage electronics, the 808s, 303s, 101s, as I have found out last month.

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Another space kommunique comes courtesy of the Sofians 1000names, whose predominantly beat-oriented music also ventures into more offbeat realms. No wonder their latest EP A Minute a Day is accompanied by a short science story introducing a brand new machine, the TAPE-D-TRON-1000, which is able to “translate the audio signal from a magnetic tape into abstract virtual images which are then projected through a complex sensory system in front of the eyes”.

∑BOL▲ ▲P∑, the mysterious monkey from Congo via Gdansk, continues in the extraterrestrial sonic vein of this month, immersed in an ominous haze and interspersed with mangled vocals not dissimilar to those by the master of this craft (Burial, ofc), with an almost ironically entitled release Humanity, as if it wasn’t its demise that we’ve been witnessing in the last couple of years. It seems that these days in music, it’s either escapism or doom-mongering that chimes with producers from Belgrade to Berlin, from Košice to Brooklyn. With the coming year, with 13 attached to it, I don’t expect a (sonic) redemption.~

Illustration: Vitto Valentinov

Published January 01, 2013. Words by Lucia Udvardyova.