Ryan Huber: Kholstomer CDr (Inam Records, 2016)

October 16, 2016 at 1:10 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Ryan Huber: Kholstomer CDr

Ryan Huber continues to evolve his sound through his steady stream of limited CDr releases. While several years ago he was doing something in the realm of doomy post-rock, at this point he’s doing a permutation of noisy, droney techno. This one starts off with a short, eerie piece with flanged echos and growling noises. “Sanhedrin” is the first of many tracks with a beat. Huber’s techno-ish tracks favor droney repetition, but on some of these ones it seems like there’s more of a clearly definied build and release. “Amarkhan” in particular is a piledriver. The title track starts out with rhythmic ticking and gradually gets washed out at sea, sounding distant and buried under waves at the end. “Macedonia” sounds more ecstatic, but it prefers to stay stuck in the moment for most of its duration. “Raytheon” is far less immediate, starting out as a tense vibrating drone, but eventually a calmer, non-4/4 beat emerges. “Duress” is the opposite, starting out with a jittery beat and then switching to weightless drone for its second half. “Returned” is another repetitive, stuck-in-the-moment track, but its beat pattern, while constant, switches the beats around so that it seems more sporadic. The track seems to end a minute before it actually does, but the beat pattern continues to be very muted and subtle for the last minute. Available on Bandcamp.

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The Answer Is In The Beat