Succubus is a band from Bandung, Indonesia formed in 2016. Their music is influenced by punk, post-punk and deathrock.
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After a very good cassette, Le miroir aux morts, released on Vague à l’Âme, we are happy to be able to call this next release of Überspannung ours! Overall a bit less spiraling, the synths again meander over the drum machines and under the bass, which sounds like it was recorded straight into the tape machine. Some songs are more upbeat and skillfully layer their melodies, while others are dominated by hard drum machine beats and energetic, furious vocals. I also sometimes think of Falco! It’s a hit! Digital Album [free download]
Cybotron has re-emerged in our contemporary cybercultural age when artifactual futures begin a transition into a new era of “Meta”. By combining their knowledge of philosophy, science fiction, and mechanical engineering, at a time when electronic instrument companies were only just beginning to distribute their products to the masses, two prosumer audio technicians named Juan Atkins and Rik Davis were able to re-engineer Cybotron – a combination of the words “Cyborg” and “Cyclotron” (an atomic particle accelerator) – to be used as a home studio performance music that would change the course of independently produced and distributed electronic music. Techno’s blueprint spread across the Detroit-Berlin Axis between Metroplex and Tresor. As human society began its transition from a post-industrial to an information-based market economy, Cybotron enabled a thorough system override of the human senses towards a tangible man-machine hybridity and showed the world how to channel their emotions and imaginations into new sound technologies and create new ‘sonic’ spatialities where listeners can transport themselves out of the physical world into the future. The cover of their debut album Enter (1983) transmitted a fragmented view of a body in motion being digitized mid-stride, dissolving physical and virtual reality into sonic fiction.
From the frost-kissed expanse of the North, an album named “Lapland” emerges from Katerwol’s creative sanctum, an exploration of his Sami lineage. The Sami, for those unacquainted, are the indigenous denizens of the Arctic, a people whose song has echoed across the icy plains, fjords, and tundras of Scandinavia and Russia for millennia, and whose history, like the labyrinthine forests of the North, is both rich and shadowed. With every note, Katerwol delves deeper, and as he descends, the narrative grows increasingly somber. We’re led on an odyssey, not just of a people’s extermination of culture but a reflection of Katerwol’s own metamorphosis. The track “Such Filth” becomes an anthem of cyclical birth, echoing the ethos that from the murk and mire, radiant beauty can ascend. It’s a chant, a hymn to origins and the phoenix-like rise from desolation. On the subject of “Starvation”, Katerwol muses: This song, though cloaked in fiction, unveils a tale of love once effervescent, now dulled post the ‘honeymoon phase’. Both souls, parched for each other’s touch, find themselves trapped in a vortex of unsaid emotions and suppressed needs. Their dance, though yearning for connection, is marred by a cyclone of misunderstandings and perpetual discord. In this ballad, the lovers find themselves lost, yearning, and ensnared in a web of their own making. Sonically Lapland’s auditory palette is rich, coloured with the gritty hues of post-punk, the electric vibrancy of synth-pop, the pulsating rhythms of EBM, and the melancholic undertones of minimal wave. It’s an alchemy that Katerwol has mastered, creating tracks that resonate deeply, echoing both the icy vastness of the North and the warmth of human emotion. Each song becomes a journey through time and self, a testament to Katerwol’s prowess as an artist and the timeless resonance of the genres he so deftly melds. |
