Highly anticipated avant-garde and electronic festival Berlin Atonal forces itself to take a year off, as anyone living through these times can understand. In lieu of celebrating the global summit of underground, boundary-breaking experimentalists in the flesh, the crew behind the event offer a mammoth five disc box set of new works representing a sizeable portion of their festival staples, covering nationalities, projects and ideas from a wide musical landscape.
More Light speaks to the large-scale immediacy of action felt across these tracks; bursts of colour in the dark. French producer Aho Ssan renders a subtle brutality into ‘Wondertomb’, anchoring Exzald S’ reaming vocal with futurist compu-synthesis. The striking approach is later echoed by Lafawndah’s ‘A Walk Beside The Beast’, her percussive ritual measures marching with a dub producer’s sensitivity for bass and rhythm. ‘Isonainen’ sees Vladislav Delay delivering one of his most scorched tech-noise stormers in recent memory, neatly preceded by the bitrate club crunch of Nkisi’s ‘La Parole’. Belligerence is paired with mournful ambient mood pieces by Laurel Halo and Galya Bisengalieva, rounding off a release which undoubtedly covers all bases of experimental electronic innovations occurring in pockets all across the world.
Where nothing could surely substitute the festival itself, nothing comes closer to the experience than the head-spinning comprehensiveness of More Light.
