Jochen Arbeit and Sonja Kosche – Zuhaus

Erototox

This is a feathery snake of an album. The quality of drone hovers in there like a forgotten memory that ensnares.

The first track’s clustering notes messing with your wiring in a good way, its perfume potently levitating in your skull, ominously glowing like the matt-black gloom of the stately artwork. The up close and personal photographic angles of the instruments that adorn the cover giving material context to the abstracted sonics swarming in your speakers.

Jochen Arbeit and Sonja Kosche have created a gorgeous unfolding beast here where the second track’s backward glances flap like clipped wings, overtaken by this fricative rub of taut metal. A sawing texture interjected by loose melodic hooks, fluttering fractals layered up, dramatically miraging left to canter carnivorous.

The spooky disquiet of “Raum III” – a personal fav — prisming malevolently, conjure-crawling in your eye as it tendrils the space between, like some hymn to otherness trying to shake its containment.

The droneal solemnity of “Raum IV” is shot in sorrowful threads of trickling piano, a saturated continuum fraying in gentle discordia. The immersive flavours that follow this scenically dwelling, tied up in wafts of rousing optimism. That chiming glint a warped time-piece eaten into by coptered strings and key-toned climb.

The tension between these two musicians is superb, it weaves hypnotically throughout every track, culminating on the gamelan-like refractions of the final track. Contaminated fruit spiralling out on a witchcraft of textural tarot, returning to the ominous fray of the first “Raum I”, now haunted in half-heard apparition and curious saturation.

Zuhaus is an electro-acoustic pleasure to savour.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-