Synapscape
The Future
Ant-Zen
Synapscape have nothing to prove to anyone other than themselves at this juncture. Thirty years and fourteen LPs deep into their career, the German duo of Philipp Münch and Tim Kniep have earned the right to either reprise the scraping, break-ish power noise they pioneered in their early years or, as is the case with new LP The Future, give themselves license to drift from that brutal and uncompromising remit.
Carrying on from 2022’s The Stable Mind, Synapscape’s detours from ‘power noise for power noise’s sake’ finds them revisiting many of the genres and periods which preceded the style. There’s the dubbish echo and squall of “Five Four”, while “Pick” and “Valley” both feature foreboding synth stabs and rubbery bass taken from vintage dark electro and reframed in Synapscape’s far more skitterish rhythms.
It’s tempting to try to trace the origins of these fluctuations, but as was the case for many years with another German duo in Haujobb, one member’s constant stream of side and solo releases concurrent with mainline projects, in comparison to the other’s relative silence out of the duo itself, makes this a tricky proposition. Münch’s recent spate of work as neat_less, for instance, is not so far from the serpentine, funky lope of “Disappear”, but there’s unquestionably something in those tracks which in unquestionably Synapscape and nothing else. Is that je ne sais quois the result of Kniep’s quiet but firm hand, or just the natural result of the pair’s chemistry?
Such questions are effectively academic at this point. Synapscape’s legacy has long since been established, and for those who’ve spent any amount of time with the records which built it, there’s an easy pleasure in listening to them rework and rethink the sounds upon which it sits.
