Visitor
Recto/Verso
Disko Obscura
That it took German tastemaker label Detriti to draw our attention to the most cutting edge EBM in Canada back in 2018 with the release of Expat was an indication that Edmonton’s Visitor was going to be an idiosyncratic beast. Cryptic and standoffish yet decidedly funky, Philip Traikovski-Klahr’s records have brought together roots EBM and cyber-slick dark electro under the rubric of a personal style of sound design which is as addictive as it is irreverent. Six years on from Technofossil, third LP Recto/Verso recapitulates that record’s outré burps and bleeps into the tightest and most immediate missive we’ve yet heard from Visitor.
The dense flurry of sprained bass, gurgled vocals, ghostly chimes, and compressed percussion programming which opens things on “Flesh Device” is both a solid reintroduction to Visitor’s core aesthetic as well as Recto/Verso‘s savvy compositional strengths. Boil the cut down to its most skeletal frame and you’ll find a structure not too far from any number of classic FLA joints, and it certainly has the corresponding drive and bounce you’d expect from one, but there’s simply so much drippy, colourful excess that you’ll barely notice how locked into the groove your limbic system has been.
That technique of blending Visitor’s garish excess into cinched-in structures runs through the whole of Recto/Verso‘s well edited runtime. From the X-Files-esque whistles and Atari clavichord rolls of “On The Line” to the way that chewy plucked strings bob through the swamp gas ambience of “Food Of The Gods”, there’s such a panoply of evocative and inherently satisfying sounds in Recto/Verso that the locked on target percussive clinic that is just “Steel Tongue” whizzes past. This a record which will give you some of the most precise and satisfying EBM you’ll hear this year…and pepper it with samples from Japanese visual novels, because that’s exactly what you sign up for with Visitor.
Despite a rise in the profile of left field EBM in North America since Visitor’s arrival, it’s still very hard to identify one-to-one comparisons amongst their nominal peers. I suppose the seething goblinisms and fluidly sampled basswork of the lengthy closing title track might almost be akin to Spike Hellis abandoning their compositional severity and roving off into some impressionistic vamping, but that’s still a stretch. In making as immediate (if not traditionally “accessible”) a record as Recto/Verso while still keeping the focus on the sheer volume of funky weirdness which has made Visitor so distinct, Traikovski-Klahr’s cashed in on the alien ore he’s been mining for years on his own terms, and given us one of the best body music records of the year. Recommended.
Started on track 1 and ended up listening to the whole thing in one sitting. Lots of great music dropping as of late.