Enjoyable edgy electronica from two Polish newcomers Jacek Doroszenko and Marcin Sipiora, here appearing as Ampscent on their self-titled six-track CD (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 286-2). Their approach to experimentation is to break rules, throw everything into the melting vat, and stitch together any residual overflow into freakish, crazed non-designs of their own making, following spontaneous and intuitive non-rules which they keep inside a mental cupboard with three locks.
From what I can gather (their prose is vague), they like contemporary electronic music but they’re raiding whatever they can find on the scene like two magpies descending in guerilla style, seizing what flotsam and viscera they may on the battlefield. To them, “noise” and “failure” – the latter meaning happy accidents, I suppose, resulting from broken equipment or digital glitches – are reckoned as hallmarks of success. Likewise, they’re strong on “disruption and deformation” as they would have it, and would like to make the act of listening to a record as difficult as possible for the listener. But don’t get concerned, as we’re guaranteed to come out of the other side of all this pain with our tortured psyches cleansed, and emerge from the experience a wholler man. Ampscent probably aren’t quite as wild or noisy as they’d like to think, but this record has some strong moments, especially in the opening tracks. The long piece ‘Nothing But The World’ might be their showcase, both in terms of the multiple techniques (beats, loops, layers, distortion etc.) and the underlying “message” which might communicate something about the fragmentary state of contemporary society. (28/06/2023)