Paroxysmal Attack

Nice to get some new releases from Kvitnu, the Ukranian label that’s home to many bursts of abstract electronic enfilades. On Paroxysmal (KVITNU 42), we’ve got 12 cuts from festival favourite Matter, who is Fabzione Matrone from Bologna. This is in fact his third album for the label and his catalogue stretches back some eight years. The press notes describe him in terms of carving, cutting, wrecking and destroying, as it were grasping for the right metaphor to capture his studio approach to shaping and working his highly distorted tones. To my ears he’s somewhat in the vein of Massimo, fellow Italian who enjoyed some brief success with Mego, and likewise had a very hard-edged, no-nonsense approach to his sculpted noise and avant-techno beats. As to Matter, who also makes frequent use of beats, his album veers from underground disco noise to simple patterns formed from quasi-experimental tones and back again, alternating freely between these two basic modes, except maybe for the times when he fancies the need for a little sinister semi-industrial grinding as of evil computer rooms plotting to subvert the world through data corruption. In all, a punchy and very solid album, even if somewhat grim in tone…its surliness extends to the titles, which are always single-word hammer-blows to the brain, and the vocabulary seems more appropriate to industrial by-products from deep sea mining explorations, with terms like ‘Pressure’, ‘Chamber’ ‘Depth’, ‘Surge’ and ‘Ash’. Electronica heroine Zavoloka did the cover although the images come from Pier Paolo Patti. Arrived 12th October 2015.