En
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Ni

This nearly-live performance piece is a collaboration between Origami Galaktika, one 'subunit' of Norway's Origami Republika artists' collective, and baldy French industrialist Mimetic from Von Magnet, recorded on their travels around Eastern Europe in 2001. I say nearly-live because the CD consists of recordings from three separate venues, without any way of distinguishing between them; there's also no crowd noise or other artefacts of the listening environment until right at the end. It's split into nine tracks, with no names, just numbers in - presumably - Norwegian; I wonder how much was rehearsed in advance and how much was improvised.

It starts off pretty minimally, with low-frequency drones and distorted, unplaceable sounds fading in and out, but every so often a snatch of haunting melody or a primitive fragment of rhythm emerges dreamily from the chaos. By track three things start to warm up, with a slow, gritty breakbeat that reminds me of Techno Animal's seminal sleep-dep freak-out "Re-Entry". After a brief reprise, track five opens out into an insistent technoise drum pulse that dissolves into incoherent, bitcrushed noise at the end. None of this will quite prepare you for track six however, which starts off as a repetitive minimalist glitch and gradually evolves into a mutated loop as if of a far-off violin and piano playing chamber music over a broken radio transmitter. This continues through track seven after which it deconstructs itself once more. Beautiful.

This is the outstanding portion of the CD, although mention must be made of track eight, a sixteen-minute exposition comprising various more or less rhythmic sequences with some disembodied voices and noisy atmospherics in the mix. The more I listen to "Origamimetic", the more the comparisons to "Re-Entry" assert themselves, and that was an album that slowly grew on me and then stayed somewhere near my hi-fi for many years - so it bodes well. They share a dreamlike, delerious quality, and a knack of forging order out of chaos before letting the chaos take the reigns again. And neither of them can be appreciated piecemeal - you have to listen to the whole album in one sitting, as with each CD individually in Techno Animal's opus. Give this one a try - it's quite a trip.

ABC