Matt Cooke Davis is the mind behind Craque, a project of highly abstract instrumental electronic music that often defies easy categorization. He's not afraid of melody or traditional rhythm, even at times can lay down a healthy groove, but most of his music is characterized by heavily processed and manipulated sounds derived from everyday objects. Typically, though, these sounds are far removed from the source and take on a weird, synthetic life of their own.
Gamma is a free mini-album for the Test Tube netlabel, and from the first few seconds of "Penetrarette," Craque is already bending sound into something surprising, a whirling rush of color and texture. It's a brief palate cleanser, wiping out whatever may be in your mind to prepare you for the more subtle and strange longer pieces to follow. "Cirkulit" is built largely around an oddly catchy synth phrase, but the rhythm section, consisting largely of clicks, blips, and fragments, skitters around it, often disorienting you in the process. Like "Cirkulit," "Gruven" (perhaps a play on phonics) is anchored by an off-kilter musical phrase -- in this instance, a series of delayed guitar chords and an odd melodic pattern. "Matterbuss" incorporates some buried field recordings and has a strange free jazz quality about it (in spirit more than sound) while "Orgaslsp" is probably the most unusual of the bunch, with an insistent, rhythmic synth sound that reminds me of heavy breathing, sounds darting in and out of one another as this odd machine gasp persists in rhythm. He saves the most direct beat for last on "Liberation," a downtempo groove that references hip hop in the most leftfield of ways, pitting weird pitched cymbals and choppy samples against a smooth bass synth that ties it all together.
It's another in a series of free digital releases that Craque has produced in the last couple of years, definitely worth a gander for any fan of abstract electronic music. His own approach to strangely infectious grooves takes a bit of time to set in, but it's hard to deny once it does.
more info: Official artist site | Myspace | Test Tube album detail
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