Artist Detailed Info: Code Inconnu

Austrian group Code Inconnu operate on the cusp of post-rock and electronica, favouring the latter on Spoil, Microbe, a hall of mirrors in which the instrumentalists and their sampled and treated doppelgangers do battle. Occasionally the complexity of the music, with its odd meters and shifting harmonies, leads to a suffocating density. The best moments here see them picking up the technological gauntlet thrown down by Tortoise's "Djed", something most post-rockers haven't thought even to try. "Sleepless Music" is one of the best things I've heard this year. Guitars billow like slowly advancing clouds of mustard gas over a slippery, cut-up 9/4 beat, before subsiding into a passage of beutiful eerie arpeggios, then erupting into a free noise coda complete with digital groans and splutters. In fact noise codas seem to be a speciality. "Fu" climaxes with a monstrous rising guitar figure strafed by Hecker-like squawks and squeals, and the final section of the superb "Seeds" lapses into a moody landscape of dark electronic harmonies and percussive blips and thuds. Spoil, Microbe is a bit too cluttered, as if the group are trying to cram all their tricks into each track, but that's an understandable lapse, when the tricks are as good as these. Code Inconnu just need to let it all breathe a little, and they could be world beaters.

← Go Back