Fern by Alex Ketzer
The musical path taken by Alex Ketzer on each and every of the records lining his evolutive career as both a musician and label curator seems to inexorably drive him closer and closer towards the cusp of some sort of bleached-out, post-rave stasis.
Revolving around stripped-down harmonics and intricately woven layers of elevated electronics, his newest incursion into full-length territories, “Fern”, finds him dissecting industrial and ambient tropes under the magnifying lens, peeling their idiosyncratic character off down to its most elemental nature, then reshaping the crumbs into fresh malleable matter to toy with.
A polyphonic ballet of fractured signals and modular speleology, “Fern” blazes with an understated rage at heart, brewing its trouble under thick blankets of post-XTC snooze while seamlessly surfing the crest between nocturnal abandon and morning resuscitation.
Segmented into ten movements rather than proper tracks, the story in sound told here channels energies from genres wide and apart—from the beatless poetics in motion a la Vangelis of “I” to the folk-infused soundscaping on “III” and “IV”, through the bleak, throbbing abstraction of “VII” and modular playfulness of “VIII”, the momentum is clearly set towards building rhythmic expression from the ground up—from the bleary ashes of dance music components to a newly minted alphabet of deep, immersive textures and non-formulaic motifs.
Eventually ascending onto a more figurative strain of body music on final cuts “IX”—a fluxus-adjacent maze of ultra-processed riffs and eerily cinematic atmospherism, and “X”, where Ketzer pulls out a symbiotic concert of ethereal dub techno maneuvers and mantra-like staccato, coming full circle with his deconstructivist approach of functional music, we’re left hanging at the very edge of this iterative, sisyphean act of creation, from chaos to order and back into this infinite loop again.
Credits
— Recorded and produced by Alex Ketzer
— Mastered by Tangible Air
— Photos taken in Yelverton, Dartmoor Nationalpark, UK
— Liner Notes by Baptiste Girou
License
All rights reserved.
NOORDEN is a Cologne/Germany based label for electronic(a) music. We’re a collective of musicians, artists and designers releasing electronic music with an experimental DIY-flavor while pursuing our passion for carefully crafted artworks and special packagings at the same time.