Don’t freak out, dudes… it’s only the album art for Personal Dada, by Kolomoev & Rita Bzigi… I know, I know, for a second there it looked like we might be staring through a Predator’s chest. I think the glass is just really warped, though.
Artists: Kolomoev & Rita Bzigi
Title: Personal Dada
Label: Sirona-Records
Cat#: Siro767
Keywords: Ambient, Experimental, Drone, Noise
Reviewer: Alex Spalding
Remember that part in Indiana Jones when that dude ripped that other dude’s heart out and ate it? That was cool.
Anyway, welcome to another review at Yeah I Know It Sucks!
It’s been a long time since I’ve paid a visit to Sirona-Records, arguably the best net-label to ever have existed. This album was put out while the label-head Arnaud was not too busy being a superhero of awesomeness, or surprising patrons of small cafes across Cannes with excellent customer service. It is described as ambient, experimental, drone and noise type musics, but… well, we’ll see. If I get 15 minutes in and start hearing anything else, I’ll try and let you know about it.
Right away, ‘Personal Dada’ feels like a chime-scape. A rhythmic, dense obstruction cuts in like a giant motor vehicle in the mix right out of nowhere. You thought about hitting the horn, but you’re already over it. It feels like gears, a conveyor belt leading us to our impending doom in a very sweaty and grimy factory in hell. The sounds really seem to glisten with grime, but suddenly the pores of the mix become unclogged and a kind of honky tonk piano thing floats in. The audio is manipulated, echoing and warping. We’re left in a surreal space with meathooks dangling around and honky tonk pianos. It sounds like a rollercoaster car is being lifted by a belt, and now we’re… surrounded by white noise and vague chatter. When that drops away I hear a very disturbing squeak of some kind.
There’s a bass guitar… it’s hard to develop a clear picture in my head of what’s happening or where we are. It’s like a strange dream, where I’m in a guitar shop listening to someone play around on a bass, but also a derelict factory operating autonomously. It works, because even in my real life dreams I’m often confronted with composite spaces of multiple functions. I don’t know what that means. Suddenly, a thunder storm rolls in, because why not? Maybe I just imagined that. How did a dog get in here?
A low sizzle… a sinkhole has opened and we’re being swallowed, but it’s all very lo-fi so only seems partly real. I’m hearing the conveyor belt moving, snapped up by jaws. Something’s popping… maybe someone left something cooking on a stove and forgot about it…
… I feel like I lapsed off, lost in thoughts for a bit. No worries, I’m back, and I think I hear something very large stomping around in the mix, through dark forests… rusty machines are always finding their way in, though, even where seemingly organic soundspaces are predominant. The low fidelity and distortion always make me feel here like I’m at the mouth of some Lovecraftian psychedelic warp in the fabric of reality. We’ll have to make double-sure to keep our wits in this soundtrack.
I’m loving this one particular sound that comes in with some subtlety at 19:07 or 19:08, sounding like a deranged merry-go-round, it just kind of flashes in and creates another spacial texture for awhile. Briefly subsumed by another louder noise… there’s something being shaken, now. A death rattle. A distorted phone receiver message, very unsettling, and it fades with reverb.
Now, the mix becomes dry and we hear some electronic noise, a cowbell being struck or stirred around a bit? Lasers screaming… where before this felt like mixed sound environments, now it’s like we’re in a flat, neutral place filled with very focused sound. Now it feels like synthesizers are being seared on a grill. Very tooth and drill type sounds now, a flushing of oral fluids. What if all of this had been the sound of the nothingness brought on by nitrous oxide, we’d been put under by a dentist and have now awoke mid root canal? Ugh… scary. The sound of swarms of bees in the distance makes me feel even more unnerved. No, now it’s like they’re flying individually into our teeth! This is just a terrible way to go! The cowbell bangs on. The drills have become alien technomorphic instruments.
The lights go off, people slam doors and now I’m hearing some very disturbing muzak, reminding me a lot of the soundtracks used in these creepy videos I was shown a day ago of dead malls and hotels and other vacant and condemned places. Liquid noise, voice recordings stretched into grotesque aberrations. I hear carols, and once they rise up to the surface of the mix they seem to contort into screams as harsh blasts of plastic surge through and a guitar is pummeled. It becomes chaos, then suddenly it all disappears, and we hear birds, then this really cool section of lo-fi rhythmic noise and tape compressed midi-sequence chirping. I can’t even imagine at this point what we might hear next.
Some flatulent giant is grunting and burping and farting. Blasts of guitar and noise float in like at regular intervals. This section goes on for awhile, getting weirder and weirder. I hear, finally, some slamming bass tones, angelic organ making for a very strange pairing of soundscapes, and I really like it. Backmasked voice… probably my favourite part of this whole track is the lengthy section, just before the end. The organ plays alone now, a serenity we’ve only been afforded now, at 46 minutes. The throb of a heart in reverse comes in.
As the organ plays, now we hear some growing textural noise, some stuff slamming around. Very bassy tones underneath… some distorted crackles swell up. Then, it seems to all fade to a recording of a street below.
Such a journey!
Well, reader… after some careful consideration, I decided it would be best to share a link with you. You should definitely click it… I don’t know what might happen if you don’t. You could drift elsewhere, like to another review, or maybe another tab or some weird thing that makes no sense at all. Scary. So, here it is… click just to be certain that won’t happen to you, and listen to this majestic and surreal audio-scape of confusing imagery and sound:
https://archive.org/details/siro767KolomoevRitaBzigi-PersonalDada
Yeah I Know It Sucks 