c.Kostra: Parallel Murderverse + Parallel Partyverse (Pytch Records, 2018)
November 29, 2018 at 6:46 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
c.Kostra: Parallel Murderverse
c.Kostra (Ryan Olcott) is behind the dreamy, tape-smudged sound of
Devata Daun‘s magnificent music. His solo material is just as woozy and trippy, but he masks his singing with vocoders and glitches, and there’s perhaps a bit more touch of Prince to the home-baked chillwave funk of his 2016 debut,
Now I Feel It. He’s released two EPs this fall, both of which are similar in tone but vastly different in mood.
Parallel Murderverse (which came out on Halloween) is the devil over his shoulder, coaxing out his darkest impulses. It’s still danceable, but it’s creepy and sinister, sort of in between twitchy electro-funk and Tobacco. The few comprehensible lyrics are paranoid and haunted, but still a bit tongue-in-cheek (just check the gleefully vicious “Psychosis On the Playground”). Throughout, ultra-compressed shoegaze guitars blare out from the carefully crafted rhythms. The EP’s final song, “Barely See Me At All”, nails an early-’80s goth/minimal wave sound, but with the producer’s ghostly vocoders intact.
c.Kostra: Parallel Partyverse
is perhaps the angel to
Murderverse‘s devil, but more accurately, it’s a surrealist party record with a heavy dose of romanticism. “Holiday Music Stream” loops found samples into a fantastically blown-out, half-melted disco jam. “It’s the Way I Feel” sounds even more scrambled, yet the sentiment is strong enough that it can’t totally be obscured. A brief snippet of a “bad take” of “Holiday Music Stream” provides a tiny behind-the-scenes glimpse of the process behind his tape-warped sound. It all ends with the squishy slow jam “Candlelight”.
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