Today’s Discovery brings a city to life…
What comes to mind when you think of Belgrade? Katharina Klement went on a nine-week mission to discover the sound of the city, and came away with a multitude of answers.
peripheries plays like a sonic photo album, the images more important than the flow. While the album begins with a thump, the field recordings soon settle into a sort of rhythm. As the set progresses, a tapestry is revealed. The overture of the city is heard from a balcony: dogs, sirens, traffic, street music, passers-by. A discernible hum emerges. Is this Belgrade? Can a single chord, a melange of sounds, sum up the city? Klement answers with an emphatic no. Her explorations reveal jagged edges and clear demarcations, from Tesla’s gorgeously amplified induction motor to the bells of Saint Sava.
An unexpected poignancy visits during “nijemo kolo (mute dance)”, though one must read the liner notes to detect it…
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A lean, blue-hued futuristic city adorns the cover of Ikonika‘s Distractions, her first album in the last four years. It’s not clear whether the processor-like structures depict a city or the inside of a computer, which positively describes the old metaphor of cities as relentless modern machines. This place, however, is not overbearing and it does not attempt to overwhelm your senses – on the contrary, it is quiet, almost ascetic, at least in comparison to the usual cyberpunk images of future electronic cities. The music is equally lean and direct, a reduction of the relentlessly mechanical to its simplest emotional keys: great beats, short experimental voice clips, a sense of echoing space at slow speeds and considered paces. The distractions within an ordered, functional machine are not the product of spectacle but of something much more low-key, a reductive passion in which speed and light do not…





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