Despite his moniker of choice being Japanese in origin (the English translation being ‘horseshoe crab’), Kabutogani is actually a French producer who first emerged back in 2001 with his minimalist glitch-oriented ‘Control Design’ CDR collection on Guerilla Underground. ‘Bektop’ represents Kabutogani’s fourth artist album in total, and certainly conforms to the recently relaunched Mille Plateaux label’s minimal, clicks & cuts aesthetic, indeed, harsh, cold and brittle are perhaps the best words to encapsulate the predominant mood here. Composed entirely from rhythmic glitch elements, the twelve tracks gathered here see Kabutogani assembling a collection that’s austere to the point of severity at moments, and while the jarring textures may prove forbidding for some, there’s certainly plenty of unexpected beauty to be found here.
While opener ‘Protocole 1′ sees Kabutogani seemingly trying to test the listener’s threshold from the outset with its piercing, threshold of discomfort high-frequency tones, persistence is rewarded as a slide into fluttery clicks and distantly looming sub-bass tones signals the transition into ‘CXEMA’s slow-motion glide through doomy synth tones, jittering pin-prick rhythms and vaguely dubby bass elements (though there’s still plenty of piercing, high frequency thorns to be found in amongst the lusher parts). ‘Seisen’ meanwhile sees harsh walls of machine noise and what sounds like the rush of downloading data echoing against relentless, clipped midtempo rhythms in an offering that nods overtly towards Prefuse 73-esque leftfield hiphop at points amidst cavernous, doomy sounding drone-scapes, while ‘Ducts’ offers up the closest thing to a broken, substantially devolved techno pulse here as glittering melodic elements float against a treacherous backbone of crunching static. Meticulously produced dark stuff that’s likely to go down well with fans of ultra-minimalist glitch and clicks & cuts along the lines of Oval and Alva Noto.
Chris Downton
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