Published by Alessandro Violante on November 21, 2016
It’s november and while watching outside from your window, you’ll probably see a gray sky with thick rain. If this affects your mood, you’ll could feel upset too. Just take Meta Meat (a new project born from Somekilos of 2 Kilos & more and Phil Von of Von Magnet) first album, entitled Metameat, press play and close your eyes. You’ll awake in Armenia or near there, listening to the sounds produced by Durduk and Zurna, and suddenly you’ll feel the heat and the burning energy unleashed by its songs.
Meta Meat is the perfect meeting of tribal rhythms and electronic music, of real and artificial, of meat / flesh (Meat) and its “spiritual” side, its “passage beyond”, an expression quoted by the promo notes written by Ant-Zen. But it’s also a refined homage to rhythm itself, detaching from its classic heavy-distorted sound, always searching for new sonic frontiers, in particular in its collaborations with Audiotrauma. This is one of them.
This doesn’t mean Ant-Zen followers won’t found the trademarks they love. In this tribal journey through far places and cultures, distortions and cold rhythms progressively show themselves, although only being a part of the whole and not the main elements.
The opener Melt recalls the already mentioned musical and cultural melting-pot and, after an Eastern-influenced introduction, an ancestral, minimal and recursive rhythm traces the bounds of the song. Backstitch, the first song available from the album on Bandcamp, focuses on a kaleidoscopic maremagnum of warm rhythms, widening the gaze and the ears of the listener / observer, opening to a vast, far and enormous desert area. Its main element, separating the almost geometrical rhythmic building from the ambient-like sequence, is silence, a sort of tribute to John Cage, and when music starts again, the listener is fully immersed.
There are also more mid tempo songs, such as Sword and Shudder. In particular, the second one has an almost IDM syncopated rhythm, an approach similar to that of Axiome. If Deepen, through its slow tempo, represents the quintessence of the fusion between post-industrial and tribal sounds, although highlighting its electronic soul in an exciting crescendo, Tamed is one of the peaks of this album. A tribal rhythm starts quietly, while slowly its intensity grows, wrapped in an Eastern-like soundscape, until it stops and let a strongly syncopated rhythm emerge. The song ends with a strong tribal ballet in crescendo.
Rampage exhibits martial rhythms, highlighting cold distorted sounds evoking in a larger extent Ant-Zen’s classic sound, while Escapism is focused on an engaging and syncopated rhythm. Converge closes the album with tribal rhythms in crescendo, introduced by cinematic soundscapes.
It isn’t easy to describe Meta Meat first album, a very well made mix of different worlds. On the one side there’s East, on the other side there’s West, with all their peculiar differences. It’s something “new”, a sort of experiment. Meta Meat remind us that everything started with rhythm, and that rhythmic noise fans should search the nature of rhythm very far in space and time. An engaging album, worthy of your attention.
Rating: 9
Label: Ant-Zen / Audiotrauma