your greedbagDefraktor, A Hole in the Void of the World (2X3" CD Lona Records)
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Danish electronic musician with a discography scattered across labels from Europe to Hong Kong, home of the Lona label. Defraktor is just one of the names under which Karsten Hamre releases his various styles of electronic music (elsewhere in these pages you can read about one such album under the name Dense Vision Shrine). This double 3" set comprises a suite of outside versus inside, close at hand and far away, finite and infinite.
However, "Darkness Envisioned" leads off by building a rather pleasant and cozy nest of slow rhythmic patterns, which "In a Time" takes over, with its junkyard percussion and synthesized bass which, after only a few moments breaks off, giving the listener a chance to settle in for a minute of near silence - only a distant, quiet rumble can be heard - until resuming its monomaniacal beating on metal scraps. Perhaps that breathing space was a glimpse of the vaunted "void"? In Defraktor´s portrayal, it is not scary, just unimaginably vast.
The second disc brings us much closer to the void and distant from the persistent clanging, reversing the perspective. Now we are inside, or at least proximate, "The Black Hole", a huge sucking drone into which all aural matter seems to rush. In the finale, "The Void of Universe", the beat has become obscured, more abstracted and more rapid, as if stricken by panic. The airspace around the beat has constricted and as there is not much room for soundwaves, there is not much sound. The void folding in upon us and imploding? (But what´s with the choo-choo effect at the end?).
A far-from-meaningless journey into the centre of nothingness.