The KVB
Immaterial Visions

In the steel capsule where they recorded this album, the calendar is stuck at one of the early months of 1980, the Chrome have just released Half Machine Lip Moves and Ian Curtis is still breathing. And part of Rock has gone into hiding in an increasingly black shadow cone - where voices arrive reverberated, guitars tell tales of obsession, and the martial coldness of the drum machine begins to smother the sound of the old drums. And the thermometer has inexorably fallen below zero.

Down there, Klaus Von Barrel and Kat Day seem to say that their 1980 is still in progress, and it is far from ending. The colors have not driven away the darkness. Something, yes, illuminates the darkroom where they are playing, where Berlin's Iggy Pop goes to meet the early OMD. Those who intuited that even the Velvet Underground hid their own robotic side. A light turns on. But they are sparks of sharp electricity, heavy blankets of distortion thrown on a base of synthetic minimalism. Echoes of noise. Oppressive basses that haven't been heard since the days of the Psychedelic Furs. Oblong visions, stretched by hallucinogens. Low-fidelity dreams, from which grows the anxiety of never waking up again. And in the middle of the dream, little by little, the embryo of something that someone will call shoegaze takes shape.

But indeed, we are still in 1980.