The second effort from Peter Rehberg and Stephen O’Malley has a taste for trickery and perversity. Tentative probing about heavily gated surges of amp noise and spectral hiss make up album opener, ‘Game’, conveying a concern for broad brushstrokes. Yet this gaping chasm, like a subtle fragrance, serves to merely draw one into the game at hand. After swaying through woozy spartan chords and booming electronic swells, extended arpeggiations multiply incrementally in density and Rehberg’s razor sharp electronic scribbles become a subtly constructed corpus of sweltering energy. ‘Abattoir’ is similarly marked by an experimental barbarism, with an obsession over angles and edges, as Rehberg uses varispeed loops to enhance the muffled and claustrophobic eruptions from O’Malley’s guitar into a rabid pulse before the piece collapses in on itself.
The work doesn’t amount to liquid insubstantiality, though – it can’t be explained away as loud sonic mush,. Each work displays detail, variety, risk, and surprising refinement. During a work such as ‘Snow 2′, a severe sort of economy rears its head, one in which dynamism and sonic tension play integral parts. ‘Theme’ might see O’Malley lambaste the amplified guts of his guitar while Rehberg’s dark sonics roll like thunderclouds over the horizon, but their is a dreamlike illogic to it all; a coy presence that haunts and completes the movements but is never itself seen. 2 is all about this evasion, this deviation of a sound or process from its natural end. Over the course of this album, signs drawn from black metal, dark ambient and glitch are led astray, overturned and abolished by KTL’s cunning sleight of hand.
Max Schaefer
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