Shock and Or

Kangding Ray’s Or - good enough to be 2011’s best Techno, Bass, IDM, and Electronica album - all in one! Certainly on first hearing there’s been little to rival it for sheer viscerality and fluidity of beats and bass motion, combined with textural detail and veiled harmonics; Frenchman David Letellier (mais oui!) beats the Germans at their own Spiel – not just outdoing kindred Raster-Notables like Alva Noto, Frank Bretschneider, and Byetone, but lauding it over fellow-stretchers of boundaries between aforementioned electronic sub-genres like Monolake and T++.

Kangding Ray . OR . rn123 . preview by kror

Your LMYE scribe is momentarily rendered sprachlos, so let’s get Das Wort from Monsieur Ray’s sponsor, Raster Noton:
“After the Pruitt Igoe E.P, Kangding Ray returns with his third album for raster-noton, pushing further his explorations on the edge of digital and analog sounds. With OR, Kangding Ray continues to blur the borders between experimental and bass music, and brings his signature sound to another level, somewhere at the darkest fringe of club culture.
With the massive metallic beats of « athem », the frightening distorded waves of «Mojave», the elevated groove of «Odd Sympathy», the modulated guitar walls of «Leavaila Scheme», or the low-bitrate Everest of «La Belle», KR creates deep atmospheres, loaded with echoes of collapsing economies, dysfunctional political systems, and corporate alienation.
In an abstract manner, OR depicts the desillusions of modern civilizations, while initiating a positive reflection on crisis as a creative state.
OR («gold» in french), as the only chemical element that seems to keep its value for eternity, refers to the cult of endless consumption and the absurdity of fluctuating currency valuations, while in english, as a logical operator or grammatical conjunction, OR represents the possibility of another choice, an « inclusive disjunction » which suggests that there might be another answer, a different path to follow.”

Or from Nicolas Lelievre on Vimeo.

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