Bjarki

It seems like nowadays the game is to not have a genre at all in electronic music – been listening to quite a few recent acts via Mark Archer’s excellent EPM Podcast mix and the striking thing is how many of them span many worlds.

And sometimes you stumble on an artist and it sounds like nothing you’ve heard before so the genre boxes are pointless, then again it also sounds familiar but takes very strange turns. Bjarki is one of those, an Icelandic electronic musician who started out doing fairly ho-hum techno but now is doing 90’s-00’s influenced music but stripping it to the bare parts and recombining it in odd ways. A lazy comparison is Aphex Twin, but really if there’s anyone now doing what AFX used to do, it’s Bjarki. And some great names… ‘baepolar’ is like drum and bass done by someone who’s only seen a few scribbled notes of what it should sound like. And has a really good video. ‘The Love That You Are’ sounds like some breaks acid track with the kick missing (the percussion lollops like something was left out of the kit), with sporadic cinematic interludes and baroque acid twiddles.

‘Fresh Jive’ sounds like someone fiddling inside a machine, pulling various wires out and getting different noises and breaks. Sort of a hardcore kids TV theme with some very odd subtle samples. Probably the most Ceefax or AFX-like but not. The blissful interludes are very him, those remind me of an updated Legowelt.

And then he does something very, well, normal like ‘As You Remember’ and even THAT sounds weird, like after all that, the lack of derangedness makes it somehow MORE deranged. *wibble*