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If Dutch project Zebra was an animal at the zoo, I would buy a season ticket to return to see it occasionally. First time I established contact with the sound art project Zebra was with "The Black & White Album" released on the prolific Japanese label Symbolic Interaction in 2008. Zebra's release on the Symbolic Interaction-label separated from the generally more ambient and emotional expression from the label's catalogue, thanks to a bizarre combination of abstract sound texture and subtle club-like style on "The Black & White Album". This new album from Zebra takes quite another approach to experimental sound. Behind the Zebra-project, you find two of Holland's finest and most innovative sound explorers, Roel Meelkop and Frans De Waard, who has a long collaborational experience with earlier projects together such as Kapotte Muziek and Goem. Present launch from the Zebra is as the title suggests derived from a live concert in a club called Leugen in Brussel in December 2009, but the live recording has been reworked for this release on the Korm Plastics label. As mentioned before, the approach on this album is quite different in comparison to aforementioned "The black and white album". This time the two collaborators puts serious concentration on rhythm textures and they prove a true talent in building beat structures into very catchy levels. Three lengthy pieces all with the exact running time of 12:47 minutes, slowly builds from subtle drones of strange complexity. As time goes by each track let's discreet rhythms fade in until the rhythms becomes the central part of the sound picture. But instead of dwelling in one rhythmic motion, the pieces keep changing so one rhythmic texture saturates the other in quite an impressive pace. As a listener you cannot help but getting sucked gradually more and more into this bizarre freakshow of a beat patterns. I was quite amazed by "The Black And White Album". "Live in Leugen" is a masterful continuation of Zebra and the album will keep circulating in my disc player for quite a while. A first class exercise in sonic abstraction. |
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