ZDB

Music
Concerts

Super Ballet: Moin ⟡ Kassie Krut

Thu27.03.2509:00PM
Galeria Zé dos Bois


Moin
Kassie Krut ©Kit Ramsey

Moin

A divergent entity from the Raime pairing of Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead, joined by the mega-talented Valentina Magaletti, this London-based trio revives a very parallel idea of post-hardcore without going for nostalgic or revanchist approaches. Starting from a reconfiguration of the basic principles of rock – guitars and drums – Moin arrive at music that could well have been the next step for the legendary Dischord in their movement to open up the horizons of the genre in contact with the starting points of post-rock coming more or less from there, taking place in Louisville and Chicago and on the mental path of post-punk from the British Isles. That’s why the term ‘post-whatever’ that they have chosen for themselves makes perfect sense.

Based on a brutalist guitar architecture that owes as much to the haunted harmonics and cadences of ‘Spiderland’ as it does to the hypnotic electrification driven by Magaletti’s stop-start polyrhythms and guided by electronic sketches, Moin’s sound reached an even more indicative level of its transfiguration in 2024, after ‘Moot!’ and ‘Paste’, with the release of ‘You Never End’ – always on AD93. Featuring the vocals of Coby Sey, Sophia Al-Maria, james k and Olan Monk, ‘You Never End’ develops around repetitive harmonies that weave through the rhythm in no hurry to get anywhere, coupling sparse ideas that continually revitalise the existence of these meshes, from which emerge.

Kassie Krut

“Kassie Krut began as a solo act, its name impishly garbling that of its maker, Kasra Kurt, who otherwise served as a guitarist and vocalist in Palm. While the Philadelphia-based four-piece undertook bracing new adventures in guitar music, the side project was a venue for Kurt to indulge his taste for electronics and set stray ideas to simmer. When Palm called it quits in 2023, after ten years and three acclaimed albums, Kurt decamped to New York with Eve Alpert, the band’s co-guitarist and -vocalist, and Matt Anderegg, who had produced their last record. Playing together (in person and sometimes remotely), the longtime friends and collaborators christened a new, three-headed incarnation of Kassie Krut.

On their self-produced, self-titled debut EP, the group’s approach is deceptively simple. With a constrained palette and a penchant for repetition, they find a world of opposing textures and timbres: electric and acoustic, synthetic and organic, smooth and frictive, terrestrial and celestial. Their scratch-made sounds melodize the hard-edged noise of daily life—car alarms, notification chimes, dial tones, feedback—setting it against stutter-step high hats, pots and-pans percussion, and tensile bass tones that thrash around in the head like a rubber ball. The industrial sensibility produces a sonic object with uncommon properties. It thins and thickens in our ears, tenses and softens, clots in one moment and evaporates in the next.

Alpert’s vocals are brash, triumphal, mordacious. On “Reckless,” she sing-spells the name of the band in the style of a playground taunt, (“If you ask me who I wanna be / Ima spell it out so it’s plain to see / K-A-S-S-I-E-K-R-U-T-T-T-T”), satirizing the lexicon of pop egoism while acknowledging its affective power. Here and elsewhere, the lyric sheet holds a series of affirmations equally suited for tonight’s disco or tomorrow morning’s mirror, though with odd artifacts of lived specificity. On “United,” Kurt takes a turn on the microphone in pitch-shifted falsetto, delivering a plaintive love song for wounded attachment. Even as the sounds of impossible instruments are labored over in minute detail, the group’s delivery maintains an air of detached playfulness, deploying a metallic, fun house-mirror reflection of the contemporary pop idiom.

Kurt and Alpert spent their teenage years in London, whose streets and airwaves were suffused with the sounds of dub, grime, and garage. Those early encounters were soon joined by regard for SOPHIE’s candied hyperpop, Tirzah’s attitudinal minimalism, and DAF’s turn to electronic body music, which created the template by which punk would go electronic for the next forty years. After years of twisting rock instrumentation into unknown shapes, the first release by Kassie Krut represents a transformative refocusing of energies. These tracks evince the kind of wisdom that only comes from experience—and the kind of experience that can only be scored by new sounds, still glittering with the metal filings of their making.”

– Maxwell Paparella

Next Events

I accept
By using this website you agree to the use of cookies in accordance with our privacy policy.