Cosmic Threat – Cosmic Threads

Jahtari

Denizen of WaqWaq Kingdom, Kiki Hitomi and German clarinetist Volker Hemken have teamed up with Jahtari supremo and erstwhile disrupter Jan Disrupt as Cosmic Threat for a strangely removed journey into the outer limits.

As if beamed in from some distant, forgotten outpost, Cosmic Threads merges dub reggae, electronica and gritty atmospherics with a soupcon of spiritual swing that leaves the listener constantly gaping at the imagery, the question of whether we are looking skyward or earthward and generally what we might expect from three folk lost in the dream.

There is a pretty feral groove to the dubby bounce of opener “Space Is The Place”. The echoing electric piano hints at a dust-strewn dancefloor, shuffling and sliding, muffled yet forthright. There are interjections and little cheeky layers all gradually drifting cosmoswards, an opener setting the scene but not allowing you to assume anything. Half thoughts and vague dreams, a voice whispering in your ear.

The lapping of a cosmic sea, echoes draw across a soundscape. Everything is dazed yet unruffled, the voice distorted through the ionosphere is captured in disintegrating tape, the last reel left as disparate elements revolve. It is a sparse, dismembered reverie, the clarinet blurring and merging with the groan of animals, unseen and unknown. When the clarinet lets loose as on “Here Is Not There”, the connection with the dusty dub is delicious, its spirituality oozing from the speakers, insinuating itself into your psyche.

Cosmic surf, a disembodied voice drifts as if it were the last reminder of a civilisation. So when a breakbeat arrives out of the void, you have to readjust and understand what this trio is trying to do to your understanding of what belongs together: a touch of ambience disrupted by electronic spiritualism is more than we might consider, but the deep vein skronk and slow moving sinister vibe of “Faden” is a real left turn. The voice moves like words captured and then released years later in a precious gaggle, shepherded by the careful clarinet, nudging and cajoling, trying to guide the words to their end destination. Where this is who knows.

The way these tracks can dissipate into a vapour like cosmic gases of horn and echo, eruptions of electronics and a subterranean gurgle of dislodged memory is quite a feat. The finality of the atmosphere is brought home on closer “Midori”, which is a far distant drone, a last brief attempt to communicate as the strength of the transmission dwindles into one final luminous state of static and then out like the blink of the eternal eye.

-Mr Olivetti-