Oli Kuster - Répétiteur
Looks like a solo album. But that is deceptive. Oli Kuster is anything but alone...
Suddenly the bass starts to march, in the slipstream a whole acoustic apparatus gets going. It drones and rumbles, hums and booms, stutters and rattles, wavers and meanders, and as soon as the legs want to dance, the next abstractly intricate breakbeat drives in or in between, or a dissonant disturbing beep bores into the eardrum.
Stop. Rewind. Pandemic! Stay at home, fold origami, bake bread... Bernese full-blooded and full-time musician Oli Kuster does what he has successfully resisted until now: He entrenches himself in the tinkering bunker with a modular synthesiser. A black hole of a lockdown love affair that greedily devours hours and days, for months - while you (Kuster, a trained electronics engineer with a jazz school diploma) conjure up the man-machine symbiosis by combining, switching on or off analogue-generated sounds. The flow moment when the sounding construct develops a life of its own.
From the sounds recorded on hard disk, Kuster puzzles together 13 tracks, sometimes experimentally intricate, so that it disrupts the synapses. Sometimes rhythmically robo-poppy, steering under the disco ball, if you knew what was lurking around the next corner. Insomnia techno? Offstream electro? Descent ambient? Nightshadecore? It doesn't matter. The main thing is synth sound with soul!