I think we’ve been hearing Bad Groupy since about 2023, but here’s one half of that pairing Kris Kuldkepp with her own excellent solo album, released on the label run by Bad Groupy’s other half, Jeff Surak of Washington DC. Distorted Conversions (ZEROMOON zero211) is also given its title in Estonian, Moonutatud Muundused, and same applies to the three long tracks here, where linguistically my fave is ‘Bedtime Horses’.
Kuldkepp is Estonian but based in Hamburg just now and is doing great things for curated music festivals there, as well as her own research which combines spatial sound studies with an interest in “post-humanism”. More than that, she is also a performance artist with a strong feminist message, hopefully beaming our transmissions that can combat or subdue any given pocket of male violence. Distorted Conversions was made by exploring the millennial textures and bridge-reaches of the double bass or the bass guitar, only slightly propped up by electronic treatments when the plutonium fuel supply starts running low. Slow and chilling desolations from the land of unemotional brittle statues do much to act as stern corrective to the many excesses of modern digital life, with its vanities and conceits. The concrete blocks from the Kuldkepp warehouses are indeed mighty, but more than the sound she makes, I think what comes over on this near-blank twilit album of many shades of black is her focus, her sheer effort of concentration, which never relaxes a single eyebrow muscle nor falters in its onward tread, even when it may appear that the surface musical events are minimal to the point of microscopic endeavour. If heard by the right pair of ears, music of this stern aspect could do much to improve the world, but it would be a very slow and painful process.
I expect many feminist performers since Karen Finley onwards have attempted to recast themselves as one variant or other of the Medusa, but here’s one bass-playing Gorgon that truly delivers the goods. (01/08/2023)