Mark Fell, Rian Treanor, Kakuhan

Promo

Genre: ELECTRONIC

Boomkat Product Review:

Mark Fell, Rian Treanor and KAKUHAN's ‘PROMO’ CD pressed up for the occasion of their shared Japanese tour and featuring 45 minutes of exclusive new music, now available in a limited run for public consumption via goat(JP)’s exceptional NAKID imprint.

Oozing that uniquely utilitarian sense of rhythmelodic invention that highlights their shared aesthetic and love for offbeat energies, “PROMO” is essential listening for anyone (like us) who devoured KAKUHAN's 2022 AOTY contender ‘Metal Zone’, or indeed any of Mark & Rian’s adventures in outernational dimensions. Each cut fizzes with a sharpened sense of momentum and ingenuity, displacing tradition with exactingly sparing and forward results.

Mark Fell leads with four variations on ‘Frameshift’, untangling from a miniature of pointillist Sensate Focus style dispersions to killer, finely screwed stop/start rhythms resembling classical Japanese and Korean forms that hole-punch the grid like Sheffield steel foundry machinery programmed by master percussionists. Particularly choice patterning can be found in its syncopated second part, and the Bucephalus Bouncing Ball madness of part 4, but part 2 also somehow sounds like a radical inversion of the first Analogue Bubblebath so we’re not quite sure what the afx is going on. Like all Fell’s stuff, an economy of language masks a universe of ideas.

Rian Treanor loosens that same aesthetic, opening out into more reverberant rhythmic gymnastics with drums pinging off at oblique angles like some mad, cyborg addendum to Photek’s ‘Ni Ten Ichi Ryu’ in the plucky trills and parries of ‘Branching 1’, buckling into sonorous ballistics on part 2, and smelted into quicksilver trickles and chamber harmonies on its 3rd. Over time, Treanor’s production language has turned ever more oblique and singular - and these new pieces here are really some of his best, hopefully a taste of what’s to come.

KAKUHAN finish the set (and us) off and promptly switch direction in the closing duo of tracks, foregrounding air-bending tonal/choral actions with a very World Of Echo-ish cello seeping into squashed and squirming runs of insectoid drums that sound pretty much exactly how we’d imagine an Arthur Russell x Ae collab, resolving in a more regular pattern with the claggy harmonic shifts of KFP 2. Apparently, there’s a new KAKUHAN album on the way - we cannnnnot wait.

CD (9)