Trettondagen — Kors
Static, the word common to both label and band descriptors, is the key here. Like so many before them in recent years, the aim seems to be to create an inverted or adverse sound that shuns both traditional or experimental forms and
dynamics (let alone pitch or rhythm) in favour of an extended wallowing in a single timbre. Both tracks on Kors are so successful at this avoidance of variation in any dimension that they could almost be identical.
Both begin and end with a billowing rumble that manages to maintain the same speed throughout each half-an-hour dose, whose texture is constantly rough: a crumbly, earthy kind of roar. It’s not difficult to imagine getting this effect by holding a microphone out the window of an airborne plane should such a thing be allowed. Indeed, it does impose a sense of travelling at a constant velocity and after a while reminds of the kind of ambience felt as a passenger on a long car journey in bad weather – the bassy drone of the engine steadily underpinning the sound of unrelenting rainfall on the car’s roof and windows as the monotony inspires drowsiness and with it a slightly adjusted sense of reality. Curiously, about half way through both tracks seem to suggest an increase in the rapidity of the torrent, representing the only change in dynamics on either piece.
While the prospect of an anti-art that turns conventions on their heads is always initially exciting, Trettondagen’s walls seem to be following where so many people have lead (from Merzbow in the eighties to Richard Ramirez in the nineties) making it a struggle to understand what new elements are being communicated here. But maybe this is missing the point where such things as originality and creativity are also regarded as conventional elements that are also to be dismissed on a road to who knows where?