It’s always a pleasure when ‘experimental’ music actually sounds a bit, you know, ‘experimental’. Bridges of Königsberg fit the bill wonderfully – producing a sound that is at once noisy, arrhythmic, composed and oddly beautiful in equal measure. Perhaps not a traditional beauty, I grant you that – but the approach here seems to be something other than punishing, aggressive noise, even if it at times courts that world.
Glass-like, additive synth tones haunt the background, for a while atleast, the foreground rich with falling percussion, as if someones kicked a drum kit off a cliff. Then, later, vaguely ambient square waves give way to some kind of angry, monophonic futuristic, bag-pipe player, a furious wasp rasping against the speaker. Peals of grain and dirt, inconsistent stabs, ever threatening. It’s borderline unpleasant, but when the bagpipe wasp finally dies down, a brief soujourn of industrial clangs and aimless tones provide an almost euphoric relief.
Hailing from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Bridges of Königsberg have a fair few releases to their name, many offering this same aesthetic. Theirs obviously a certain humour at work, a levity that no doubt elevates them from producing the sort of fist-shaking, one-dimensional noise music that seems dime a dozen elsewhere. Their latest release, Celebrity Veto, has a wonderfully incongruous pink cover and track titles like ‘sweet butter biscuits’ – indicative of the nuance, if not the harshness, on offer. If your a fan of the uncomfortable, the glitching, and the complex, this is likely up your alley.
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