Snd – Atavism

2009 : Raster-Noton year ? After the release of the sublime Liedgut by Uwe Schmidt (aka ATOM Tm), Carsten Nicolai and his wonderful abstract drones on Xerrox Vol. 2 and a beautiful book containing Wolfgang Voigt's Gas artwork projects, here comes another great, surprising and fresh piece of minimalism from Snd...

16 anonymous tracks blending classic techno drum parts with short musical informations that come in the form of tiny fragments of chords and reduced minimalstic organ notes, often based on the same scales, which create a minimal landscape full of small rhythm structures, simple but effective. Some breakbeat elements also come along, sometimes polyrhythms, emerge from the sound material that Mark Fell and Mat Steel use in this album.

Here they play with techno elements to create a new glitchy language made of catchy patterns, but at the same time dealing with experimental (think Ryoji Ikeda but less focused on extreme frequencies). The album doesn't really revolves around a defined structure but rather plays with the listener's senses in surprising him with sounds emerging from nowhere, sometimes linking tracks together to form a giant minimal sound building.

Quality experimentation. Strongly recommended.