31.05.2019

COOL FOR YOU – COMMUNAL MESS

Cat # CC10

Berlin’s Creamcake label is pleased to announce COOL FOR YOU’s first single, “OBJECTS AND SOLIDITY”, ahead of the release of her COMMUNAL MESS album debut on May 31.

The Berlin-based producer and multi-disciplinary artist (aka Vika Kirchenbauer) has been developing a body of work around the manipulated and pitch-shifted samples of Sacred Harp congregational choir music—a form of Protestant worship in which everyone participates and there is no “audience”. After exploring the community and exclusion this musical and religious practice implies through the harsh dissonance and queer tones of two earlier EPs, as well as a number of live performances at Donaufestival, 3hd Festival, transmediale and others, COMMUNAL MESS broadens its scope.

Kirchenbauer expands her catalog of source material to white Christian choirs in general, while working almost exclusively in odd time signatures that exist outside of the 4/4 norm. The exception here is that their difference is barely discernible. A softer sound palette and delicate syncopations in “INTERNAL VALIDITY” lull the listener into a false feeling of comfort, while a plodding muted kick drum in “STRATEGICALLY ADAPTABLE” moves the layered, cut-up chorus at an uneven pace. An interjection of coughing, spluttering performers clearing their throats and “keying” their voices to match the pitch of their peers reveals the crude bodily realities of human progress and social organization.

By disrupting the standard rhythms of conventional electronic production, while evading initial detection, COMMUNAL MESS doesn’t assimilate but instead “passes” for club music. Refusing the expectations associated with a commodified nightlife, its peculiar time signatures and irregular rhythms gently complicate their incorporation into DJ sets. As contemplations of the struggle to exist, titles like “HOW TO MOVE SO CASUALLY?” and “UNITED IN SHAME” reflect on marginality and our relationship to belonging. The external world is, after all, purely an internal experience.

COMMUNAL MESS will launch with a performance as part of Creamcake’s “Paradise Found” music and performance series at Klosterruine Berlin on June 7.

Tracklist
01. ORGAN WITH BODIES
02. ORANGE (A SCENE)
03. SPILLAGE OF BLUE
04: INTERNAL VALIDITY 
05. PHANTOM TASTE (SALINE)
06. HOW TO MOVE SO CASUALLY?
07. COMMUNAL MESS 
08. OBJECTS AND SOLIDITY
09. AN EPISODE OF SOFT SKILLS
10. STRATEGICALLY ADAPTABLE
11. UNITED IN SHAME

Mastered by Doug Henderson at micro-moose-berlin
released May 31, 2019
supported by Musicboard Berlin

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