Faqt (US)

Sogar – Basal (12k) The current trend in glitchalia seems to be leaning toward “keeping it real” – tearing their cracks and squiggles from sounds ranging from taped ambient sound to the return of instrumentation. On Christian Fennesz’s latest disc, Endless Summer, he returns to his first love: guitar (even if he does filter it through an army of effects). Jürgen Heckel, the flesh to Sogar’s shadow, twists the six-string, as well as odd non-musical objects and found-sound, behind baffles, effects, and intense processing on his debut, Basal. Unashamedly bound to the glitch genre, Heckel finds freedom in such constraints by taking the structural route less travelled: the thrumming static on “L2” mimics insistant tribal beats, before being overwhelmed by the soft hail of a thousand satellite signals. “Dek Here” refrects the single-tone studies of Microstoria into a diffused rainbow of feedback and a stuck organ note that would make LaMonte Young nostalgic, while “Blun” stacks beat fragments, crackling with electricity, into a House framework that makes SND sound like Daft Punk! The most fascinating thing about Basal, though, is that it’s vibrant, microscopic beauty was captured live. Top that, Popp!