Kobra Audio Labs – Two Blue Towers

K.A.L.'s new release is a musical homage to his hometown of Wishaw. Part audio-collage, part art object, it is released via Bandcamp as a limited-edition cassette with bespoke artwork, handcrafted by the artist. K.A.L. travels in the same territory of sonic murk and sharp edges as RZA and Anticon's Jel (Themselves / cLOUDDEAD), and imbues both continuously-mixed 'sides' of the album with an ever present menace constructed from the juxtaposition of soft synths and hard horn stabs, distorted kicks and echoplex vocals.

This is one for fans of heavy, psychedelic music – K.A.L. guides the listener on a journey that takes in instrumental hip-hop, electro, shoegaze and haunted house, never resting on one sonic palette for more than a few minutes. A fondness for distressed samples, found sounds, static and atonal noise leaven the sonic mixture, resulting in an experience that is schizophrenically both comforting and disturbing; beautiful and strange. Much respect to K.A.L. for putting the 'trip' firmly back in trip-hop – this is a million miles from the coffee-table sounds of late-period DJ Shadow; rawer, less polished, and all the more intoxicating for that.