Uitgebracht
December 2017
- There have been hints that Miri Kat plays to the "rave" half of the algorave equation. A video on her Facebook shows the Iranian-born London resident blasting speedcore during a live coding performance at Berlin's Musik Hackspace. A track on her Soundcloud, meanwhile, has breakcore's hi-velocity silliness. Her debut release proper, for Peter Kirn's Establishment label, is more serious. Brooding and ethereal, its seven tracks occupy a similar world to those of another algoraver, Renick Bell. Only Miri Kat's focus is less on stilted rhythm than on ambience and creeping atmosphere.
This atmosphere accrues across several fronts—each track comes with a video, in which footage is warped and shattered in concert with the music—and it builds carefully as the EP progresses. The opener, "3m3r63," is a hesitant sequence of disconnected ideas, while "D1574n7" resembles navel-gazing vintage clicks and cuts, its coddled pads nestled between bell chimes and flickering percussion. The tenderness is short-lived—from there, the sour "lmm3d1473" has shades of a fully-adrift Terrence Dixon, and "6r45p" stutters and hisses while plucked synth strings let out dark chord cascades. Subtle and oblique, these tracks are difficult to get a grip on. "7h3f7" provides a handhold, its wheezing percussion and sunburst melody echoing the big-room electronica of, say, Jon Hopkins. Miri Kat retreats from this peak for the queasy slouch of "fl33." And on the closer, "51r3n," a chaotic granular mulch with redemptive undertones, her playful side finally surfaces.
Tracklist01. 3m3r63
02. D1574n7
03. lmm3d1473
04. 6r45p
05. 7h3f7
06. fl33
07. 51r3n