Y

Raz Ohara released Moksha (ALB 001CD/LP) in February 2014 and it was the first release on Album Label, the new label from Shitkatapult at the time. Moksha was never meant to dictate the direction of the new imprint in terms of content. But despite this, the album could be heard as a kind of label manifesto. Moksha demands attention and time. And this is precisely what the makers of Album Label are about: listening to records and having the composure and powers of concentration required to do so. One year later, Oliver Doerell, aka Cummi Flu (of Dictaphone and Swod) drops Z (ALB 004CD/LP, 2015). It is an entirely different kind of music from Moksha, less volatile and blurred, percussive and transparent instead. Yet it is an album that belongs right here on this label, one that demands time from it's listener. Cummi Flu, who likes to generate percussion loops from the twangs of various rubber bands, creates loops with the help of all possible and impossible tone generators. What happens now when these complex, gyroscopic sounds are deflected and distorted, when you send them through the Raz Ohara grinder, so to speak? Gnawing tracks emerge from field recordings, acoustic instruments, synthesizers and kitchen utensils. It appears that not only do Ohara and Doerell get along well, but they complement each other splendidly. Together they create an extremely fine psychedelia, a kind of dark psychedelic classicism or urban voodoo music. y is a jungle album for listeners to lose themselves in. The longer you listen, the less you are interested in determining the origins of individual sounds. It's as if the sum of the music and it's psychedelic effect mask all rational thought, as if the music takes over control. Soul fragments, sung by Raz Ohara, in his broken yet commanding style, waft around the extraterrestrial sound loops. Again comes the dark voodoo tapping, Ohara's sharp inhale, after which the listener immediately hears his voice creaking and scratching, maniacally, as if it were part of a cultish act. Various time signatures are intertwined, generating polyrhythmic infinity. And before the extremely filtered flute loops regain the upper hand, the music suddenly grabs your heart and moves you in the same way the soundtrack of your youth perhaps once did. "New polyrhythmic and psychedelic incarnation. Sounding like the music of forgotten people from Venus." -IRM.