On the third full-length album by the trio of Audrey Chen, Julien Desprez and Lukas Koenig a heady blend of pitches between the wailing signals of the guitar, crashing drums and the murkier siren calls of the bass synthesizer plus others keys and effects creates a kind of mesh which rolls out over a series of compositions always in a state of flux or teetering over a precipice. Adding to the pervasive atmosphere are the snarling and rasping vocals of Chen, whose uvular and epiglottal trills and snaking susurrations on the long and incendiary ‘Seveneleven’ already call to mind Moor Mother, with the Afrofuturist and spoken word poet duly making an appearance on the next track ‘Rest Today’.
While the previous ‘Seveneleven’ is laced with distortion and finds the trio pushing all of the way into the red, on ‘Rest Today’ the drums and other percussive elements forge a cavernous space as Moor Mother’s voice, here shifted up to an almost Mickey Mouse helium pitch, ponders ‘what’s a cloud to the sky?’ and affirms ‘I won’t let you rest’ before making the prevailing soundscape more explicit, as she repeats ‘ring the alarm’ with a steely eye, enunciating with a steady surety or plainspoken matter-of-factness. While some of these choices might sound dubious on the page, the effect of these disparate traits is to shed all comedy and leave the listener captivated.
Elsewhere on RYOK the Mopcut trio call out a ‘Ceasefire’ amid the sounds of screeching tires, explosions and the rat-a-tat of ammunition, boots crunching on waste-strewn or the cold frostbitten ground and clandestine figures pulling down barbed-wire fences. From muffled gargles the title track is a teeth-chattering shortie laden with rock atmospherics which leads us into the more wispy and spectral ‘Angelica’, whose synths resound like streaked and whirring bell chimes, a drone plagued by hornets before the whop of helicopter blades emerges to encompass a vocal that one might describe as guttural or visceral if it didn’t also evoke some kind of ritual disemboweling.
The album opener ‘Sismica’ is like a strung-out take on something by Thumbscrew or Tim Berne’s trio with Gregg Belisle-Chi and Tom Rainey and ‘Where to Begin’ shapes itself around a loping feature from the veteran New Jersey rapper dälek, while equally scabrous remixes from Evicshen and their Heat Crimes labelmate Mariam Rezaei put a cap on proceedings as Mopcut blur free jazz with noise along a horizontal axis of minimalist or post-rock and keening psychedelia.
Audrey Chen is classically trained in both cello and voice and beyond her work with Mopcut and Beam Splitter is part of a longstanding duo with Phil Minton. Here she fortifies her vocal improvisations through furtive missives on the synthesizer. The guitarist Julien Desprez has collaborated with jazz luminaries and iconoclasts like Rob Mazurek, Noël Akchoté, Mette Rasmussen, Nate Wooley and Fire! Orchestra while most recently contributing to the acclaimed Muito Sol by Ricardo Dias Gomes and Texas Edition a localised extension of his work with Rasmussen as The Hatch Expansion.
Lukas Koenig is a prolific and dexterous percussionist whose recent work includes Spam Likely with Jessica Pavone and Matt Mottel, the steeped and odorous ParziFoooooooooooL with the likeminded PLF trio which also stars Peter Kutin and Elvin Brandhi and his own For Anton (Works for Marimba, Amplified Cymbal & Synthesizers) which was dedicated to his grandfather who bought him his very first marimbaphone.
Still nearer he played a supporting role on Ingrid Schmoliner and Alexander Kranabetter’s debut album as drank which dropped just last month, while his 2023 standout 1 Above Minus Underground is a kindred spirit to RYOK as it features a globe-spanning cast of fellow travellers including Desprez, dälek, Moor Mother and Victoria Shen plus the ‘scream of consciousness’ singer and beatmaker Brandhi. RYOK elaborates on the sound of Mopcut’s debut album Accelerated Frames of Reference while marking an about-turn from the twenty-five hyperkinetic miniatures of their follow-up Jitter.
