John Bence

Kill (2018 Special Edition)

Genre: ELECTRONIC

Exclusive Colour LP

Boomkat Product Review:

This stunning first outing on Yves Tumor’s Grooming label was released this summer in a run of just 100 copies and is already selling for sillies second hand. For us it's easily one of the most overlooked and vital releases of the year - this new edition comes with new artwork in a run of 200 copies, an essential cop for those of you yet to experience its wildly original mix of choral aggression and cavernous percussion sounding quite unlike anything else we heard in 2018.

Sepulchral, majestic, Kill is John Bence’s sophomore release following a début for Nico Jaar’s Other People in 2015. Since then Bence has also appeared as part of Ashley Paul’s new ensemble on her striking LP, Lost In Shadows for Slip, as well as playing in support of Grouper earlier this year.

Where Bence’s first record, Disquiet was a sort of palimpsest of re-scored composition, Kill finds him unfurl a shocking three part movement for vocals, cello and bellicose drums that should leave no one uncertain of his talents. And in that sense it’s really not hard to hear why his music has been snapped up for release by Yves Tumor’s label, as the pair patently share a feel for music both fuelled by and navigating overwhelming emotion.

In the first part, he shapeshifts from something like prime, latter day Coil in a section of reverberant cello and ghostly keening, to erupt in Prurient like howls and psychotomimetic scat like a possessed, Welsh mining choir.

By contrast, the 2nd part is pure entropy, vocals layered and decaying into extremes of the soundfield, leading to a passage recalling Aíne O’Dwyer’s haunted situations, before a real denouement comes with the sublime closing coda of vaulted vocals into noirish strings and recursive industrial percussion.

Keep a very close eye on this one...

Exclusive Colour LP (3)