Bleep

Japanese multi-instrumentalist Kyoka Kondo’s third album popped up on raster-noton, the German minimalist label who may have made their most commercial play yet when they put out her bleepy, club-friendly single iSH. Is Superpowered keeps the same spirit, though with a harsher techno leaning: lead track ‘Re-Pulsion’ features a glitched vocal sample over gastric bass and a lumbering drill beat, while elsewhere on the album collaborations with Frank Bretschneider and To Rococco Rot’s Robert Ripokku flirt with powerful melody.

‘Lined Up’ throws down dancehall vocals and spoken utterances, a pounding beat grounding the track in a very specific space. ‘New Energy Shuffle’ evokes heady trip-hop with its shuffling rhythms and phased vocal patterns, before a solid kick arrives to throb and pulsate around such modes. A stark evocation appears in ‘Toy Planet’, dark chords hovering over pained vocal expressions. ‘Moonboots’, however, calls to mind the most crystalline moments of dancefloor revelation, barely-there kicks and bass accompanying shimmering instrumentation. ‘Piezo Version Vision’ is an industrial grind of a track, a cacophony of sound underpinned by delicate, pop-friendly vocals. Whatever notions of a clubbing experience there may feature here, though, IS is a carefully balanced electronic record that works as well on the floor as it does beyond.

As featured in the Mid-year Roundup 2014