For her first EP on Make Mine Music, Nina Kernicke created a electronic world of contrasting moods, incorporating dreams and nightmares. On her first album for the same label we only get to hear the darkness. This is a record of constant rumbling menace which has essences of Kernicke’s fellow German acts.
Kernicke’s music generally consists of the following layers: a motorik Krautrock groove, skittering beats and somewhere in between a lonely distant melody. Respite arrives via the wordless melancholy on ‘Luv’; the beats are absent, revealing a tune so despairing and haunted it’s hard not to listen to it without gazing forlornly into the middle distance. Likewise the short interlude ‘Mistake’ offers up three minutes of near-elegance before it’s usurped by the thoroughly evil-sounding ‘Against The Sun’, which itself could be a lost track from A.R. Kane’s ‘69′ album sessions.
The title track is key to the nightmarish feel of the record; its seven minutes of industrial noise and spoken word (actually from James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ novel translated into German) reminding me of Laibach’s landmark ‘Kapital’ album. Usually Kernicke tends to take a more subtle approach though, her music is not suffocatingly dark and she is savvy enough to let shades of beauty (like the serene ‘Into The Sea’) in to her otherwise bleak soundscapes. For this reason, ‘Dedalus’ is highly recommended for lovers of doomy, intelligent electronic/ambient music.
Web Sites:
Make Mine Music Label Site
All Sides MySpace
Further Listening:
Laibach, Millimetrik, A.R. Kane
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