The Vinyl Chord: Soreab – Kraepelin Avenue EP

Label: Baroque Sunbursts

Purchased: Honest Jon’s in Coal Drops Yard

Why? Track #2 Flowers was playing as I walked in and I just couldn’t resist investigating.

Dystopia, or Utopia? It’s up to the listener to decide exactly what Italian-British electronic artist Soreab seeks to convey in his latest project. There are moments when the syncopated drums and cold, metallic melodies dip almost entirely into darkness and rarely come up gasping for air. Indeed, the melodies are regularly subsumed and yet tinker so crucially in the background to create a booming sense of conflict and brio. Even in the initial sounds of this four-track EP, a fusion of the industrial and the gentle is immediate. The artist’s light, ethereal start gives way to scattering electrical buzzes, before the chirping of birds, attempt in vain, to numb the drum blows.  

If the video for track three, Pods is anything to go by, the accompanying music does not follow strict laws of frankly anything. Do watch it yourself and try, as I did, to decipher the intense fascination for the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Inevitably, the listening experience is taken as a plunge more than anything. Now, I listened to this record at 8.00am, wearing my pyjamas and eating a peanut butter bagel—living in a world away from the cataclysmic dreamscape that it inhabits. But there remained that ineffable feeling of transience that accompanies an unknowable piece of music. That is precisely where the record succeeds most—in its ability to jolt and then transport. The tracks never invest too heavily in one idea. On Flowers, a woman’s warped voice can be heard only in spurts and seemingly at random points. At each turn, a new sound can be heard over the main rhythm. 

As a collection however, Kraepelin Avenue can feel overbearing. The final track—Jyraghie—is certainly less immersive than its predecessors and remains, to my ears, without a point. Individually, the first three are extremely worthwhile. Any YouTube comment section of a deep house tune will lay claim to ‘literally hearing colour,’ perhaps in another dimension. Kraepelin Avenue will do nothing of the sort. The brutal strength of Soreab’s drums, together with the dispersed electronic clangours, is remarkably evocative of our own future with all of it’s confusing bleeps and bloops and ever present robotic glaze. So, by all means, play this EP in the morning, in your dressing gown, and when you listen, listen loud. 

Share:

Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on pinterest
Pinterest
Share on linkedin
LinkedIn
On Key

Related Posts

Reflections on 75 years of The Beaver

For our final issue of the year, which is also the 75th Anniversary edition of The Beaver, a selection of our opinion and executive editors write about what 75 years at The Beaver means to them.

scroll to top