Terror of Positivity cs303

The cover artwork chosen for the bicephalous project (so unknown that even the notorious database/marketplace Discogs mispelled the name of their output!) by improvisers Andreas Pollak (playing percussions and a set of object) and Johan Graden (on a prepared piano) has been guessed for the sound they forged on this first appearance on Portuguese label Creative Sources. The portrayed image looks like an elevator shaft, where its straight lines converge on a highlighted vanishing point, which seems more a metaphor of the emotional settings and some tortuous convolutions of the thought that their installation could evoke. There are many references and quotes that cannot be immediately understood, such as the name of the album itself: it seems to be a reference to the interesting analysis/diagnosis by the South-Korean philosopher Byung Chul-Han, who referred to contemporary society as a tired society, as a consequence of an excess of "positivity", and the title of the two parts of the longest piece on this album - a sinister condensate of somehow scary aural entities, a carnival of isolated tones in between often frightful stridors, that could push your mind towards reasonably unpitiful and likewise afraid contemplations of some lumpy pustules of contemporary world -, "Hyperculture" seems to be a reference to one of the most interesting essay of this philosopher. Similarly all the fans of Antonin Artaud should recognize the quotation of his "Artaud le Momo" in the title of "O Kaya Pontoura", a disquieting confluence of creepy chord-driven melodies suffocated by tonal thuds on piano, a viscous web of percussions hits and sudden piercing dissonances, which correctly renders the mood of that poetic incomplete self-portrait. The final stage of this sonic journey, "Quad", reasonably ends on the senseless flapping of all the instrumental and noisy elements, where a sort of spell seems to involve them in a feverish ballet, whose lack of a particular direction appears to awake the dormant catalyst of the almost logical self-annihilation. Vito Camarretta (Chain DLK)