Driftmachine
Shunter

Umor Rex from Mexico City is producing one gem after another in the realm of experimental and avant-garde music. Certainly, in this regard, the role of the deus ex machina Rafael Anton Irisarri has been and continues to be crucial (he also directly handled the mastering of the record I am about to present), but in any case, the precious choices and their constant attention to high-quality productions both in terms of composition and sound quality deserve recognition.

Driftmachine is a Berlin duo composed of Andreas Gerth and Florian "Flow" Zimmer, who has been one of the key figures in the evolution of the Morr Music sound at the beginning of the last decade. Morr Music itself can be defined—just as much as Chicago's Thrill Jockey Records—as a "sister" label to the smaller Umor Rex, taking care of the distribution of its releases in the European continent. Aboard the Umor Rex experience practically from the start and from the beginning of their discography, "Shunter" is the duo's fifth album, an avant-garde work of music with dub regurgitations and modular synthetic combinations that may appear as ambitious as they are perfectly successful. The album is structurally built on a long initial session divided into four acts ("Shift") and two other lengthy compositions ("Blind Signal Box" and "The Plans Were Never Accomplished"), interspersed with the crystalline minimalist sound of "Congé." But the uniqueness lies not only in the imagery, which I would certainly define as dystopically oriented, like hypothesizing a new industrial revolution in the future—a phase of great changes (which exist, despite the air of regression on the international political level, giving hope for a brighter future) that we are experiencing and which has already been the subject of films and science fiction stories multiple times. In a combination of analog and synthetic sounds, Gerth and Zimmer use past instrumentation and analog sounds, combining them with obsessive mono-beat rhythmic elements. The synthetic minimalist sound thus combines with those cosmic explosions typical of the most avant-garde and "high" kraut-rock of the seventies and minimalist composers starting from none other than master Karlheinz Stockhausen, resulting in what we can define as absolutely convincing.

Magmatic and at the same time subaquatic, cerebral like a journey inside the human body, that "Fantastic Voyage" (1966) of Richard Fleischer headed by Captain Bill Owens (William Redfield) and Dr. Michaels (Donald Pleasence, hats off, please) aboard a submarine injected into the carotid artery of Jan Benes—a journey that crosses the Iron Curtain and from the past of the Cold War arrives up to the present day and perhaps, who knows, even further into the future.