Bleep

Başak Günak AKA Ah! Kosmos and Hainbach have both followed in the footsteps of early synth pioneers throughout their careers, with dense, mercurial compositions seeing them take apart complex analogue equipment and electronics. With a shared love for all sorts of obscure musical machinery, these two kindred spirits would eventually meet and make their first album together. The resulting Blast Of Sirens is a glorious return to in-studio collaboration after years of remote productions, represented in equal parts through buzzing subterranean tension and epic melodic confluences.

Blast Of Siren’s explorative pieces unravel sonic colour and tone with an impressive array of instruments at their disposal, among them “obscure Eastern Bloc telegraph generators, vintage nuclear test equipment and equally ancient synths”. Such technicality does not infringe upon the deep feeling each artist puts into the album, however. Rather there’s a sense that these monolithic machines have riveting stories to tell with their thudding electrified static, their razed swarms of razor sharp timbres, and their arpeggiated shreds phasing in and out.

Murky liquid pulses plunge into dramatic synthscapes on the opening title track like a radar searching for life in the dark, and finding shimmering choral stabs in the cinematic textures. That all too human feel is added to by piano and strings creeping throughout the album’s ghostly mist. Stormy low frequencies throb and cluster inside a monsoon of softly hissing noise on ‘Ghostcloud’, while clinking glass and emotive cries coarse through. ‘Brute Heart’ is a particularly evocative closer, its frenetic shots of noise spark underneath piano chords with an air of finality, turbulent yet delicate as synths saw through the reverberated transmission with cathartic melody.

Blast Of Sirens makes for a captivating first collaboration between Ah! Kosmos and Hainbach, who know how to draw out the most human sounds from any machine.