Few like Brian Leeds have been able to deconstruct the soul and morphology of electronics as we (re)know it. In a populous and ever emerging fauna of producers willing to advance contemporary music in other quadrants, the North American has already achieved a deep admiration for those who follow this path. Throughout a decade he has demonstrated possible oblique ways to understand, listen to, and develop dance music – in a purposely vague sense. Colonial Patterns was the first installation as Huerco S. A sonic labyrinth in which echoes of techno cohabit in a sound collage of static, reverb and distant memories. The bravura of a debut of this caliber gave the notion that Leeds knew what he was doing.

Three years later, For Those Of You Have Never (And Also Those Who Have) fell into our hands as if from another world. A genuine opus still lacking mapping. Practically beatless, though pulsing like an entity with a life of its own, it scratches the surface of ambient music until you feel the roughness omnipresent on their records. Pendant, Loidis, and Royal Crown of Sweden are other heteronyms that parallel Leeds signature extensive and impressive work still in writing.

Huerco S.’s third and new life again takes us to terra incognita. Plonk is an exoplanet inhabited by metallic percussions and melting synthesizers in an inexhaustible flow of possibilities. His abstract gaze continues to discover the less obvious as the engine for rhythmic and melodic mutations that settle into a state of pure sonic architecture.
The return of this patron to ZDB is a high moment. Pertinent for presenting one of the records of the year and essential for the opportunity to catch one of the brightest examples of the music that urgently needs to be heard right now. NA

George Silver’s (aka André Neves) new record is a dialectical exercise around impulse and form; an attempt to channel the flow that precedes language and to stop, listen, and go back under the commitment of not compromising it. A conversation from self to about creating with the awareness that everything already seems to have been created, without losing the awe of revelation.

The ten themes of the record (composed and recorded throughout 2021 and under the auspices of OUT. RA – Cultural Association) cross territories of cross-cultural beatific contemplation (as in “Jardim”, a meditation of encounter between Brazil, West Africa and Southwest Asia), of electronic chill for a restless sunset (“Insultório” or “Pessoas são ilhas”) or of synthpunk (in “Bom petisco” we imagine, as if heard from the other side of the river, a collaboration between Suicide and Scúru Fitchádu), to end placidly in a Parisian esplanade not-necessarily of this century (“Última rodada”).

Between transversal motifs that permanently refer to the music of a fourth world that is all civilizations and none in particular, Silver’s being-in-the-world is revealed – in all places and in all times where his music is imagined, inside the flow that precedes his language, everything is known but nothing is known.

– Rui Pedro Dâmaso