Infinite Machine have hit a real purple patch in 2016, having focused their efforts on releasing a steady stream of exploratory and non-geographical internet club music. Recent months have seen the sugar rush inducing “Leaving Thrice” from Iydes of essential London party Tropical Waste, a bombastic EP of synth and noise from recent Planet Mu signees WWWINGS and a set of rhythmically adventurous bangers from Janus affiliate Tomas Urquieta, to name a few.
Even with the strength of those releases, their latest is by far their best yet: the debut from rising Berlin artist Ziúr. Bubbling up over the course of last year, our first introduction to her came in Malin’s extraordinary Functions Of The Now mix, which opened with the powerful one-two punch of N-Prolenta’s “plastr’d, projected, purpled” and Ziúr’s “Deeform”. Since then she’s contributed a track to Peaches’ recent remix album and continued to co-promote the Boohoo club night with Joey Hansom, a party with an inclusive and experimental booking policy defiantly oppositional to the Berlin techno regime.
It’s with the Taiga EP that the world gets a fully fledged introduction to Ziúr the artist, however. To our ears it’s the most potent wielding of gnarled club noise since Lotic’s Damsel In Distress mixtape tore a path through dance music in 2014. The Janus collective’s take-no-prisoners antagonism is a good point of reference, especially with the release of Kablam’s hyper-detailed (and recently reviewed) EP this month. It’s not an entirely accurate comparison though: Kablam’s music contains respite, tapping into almost conventional modes of musical beauty between onslaughts. This contrasts with Ziúr, who never really lets up, instead revelling in her tunnel vision resistance to club music norms. This may sound like it’s all explosions and shrapnel, but Ziúr’s strength is in her expert control of elements that would overpower less adept artists. These tracks aren’t just noisy: they’re powerful. The package is topped off by a mind-melting remix by Air Max ’97. Needless to say, we’re fans.
Today we’re premiering the title track from that EP, an industrial wrecking ball that flirts with Lorenzo Senni style pointillistic trance and straightforward four to the floor between assymetric slabs of rhythm ’n’ noise. There are similarities with Toxe’s piston-powered debut release Muscle Memory, but where that release had a playful, springy quality, this is closer to the violence of Rabit’s Communion, stopping just short of the anxiety-inducing wrong-footing of that album to provide some dance floor ‘friendly’ stability before sweeping the rug from beneath your feet again. It remains to be seen how the club will react to such electric intensity, but the track – and EP as a whole – are a welcome shock to an increasingly memetic system. No mere recombination of existing tropes, Ziúr’s music is absolutely bursting with new ideas; ideas that it appears she is unwilling to water down. We anticipate big, big things.
Ziúr – Taiga EP will be released by Infinite Machine on Friday 1st July. Preorder here.
