With a steady regularity, Andrey Kiritchenko’s Nexsound label keeps on propulsing to the world some new and interesting musicians from his ukrainian homeland. It is this time the turn of Kotra, a project from Kiev whose album “Stir Mesh” comes in an elegantly packaged white and silvery case.
“Stir Mesh” seems to me to be a very accurate name for this CD. What we have here is extremely far from every sound I have heard elsewhere. The frequencies are totally saturated, yet stay precise and relatively quiet. Obvioulsy not produced with a normal synthesizer or sampler, this reminds me more of what a damaged audio file might sound like, or a text file transfomed into an audio one. The sounds used here vary very quickly and are all scraping and grinding, saturated to the limit of what your loudspeakers are able to render.
But don’t imagine “Stir Mesh” as some kind of loud, noisy and blurry chaos. The tracks are very sharp and precise, and these weird digital frequencies are used more as clicks than as scapes, making the whole thing sound closer to Oval or to some click’n’cuts release than to harsh noise. This doesn’t mean, however, than “Stir Mesh” is sweet and soft, the sonorities and tones used being really out of the norm, and the album being totally atonal.
Far from sounding too abstract, Kotra manages to create an enjoyable album that will still make a lot of exebrows raise with surprise. This is the perfect contrary of droning, a game a microscopic and sharp clicks, of mastered saturation and defitinely something that opens new doors.