- Spoiler alert: very little actually happens in Elgato's "Zone"—not, at least, going by the usual metrics of musical progression. There are no chords, no melodies; no verse, no chorus and certainly no bridge. There are only two "notes" in the whole thing, but they're so blown out and haggard, either smudged by angry filters or pitched subliminally, sickeningly low, that they barely count as such. The rest is all blips and chirps and whirr, like the chatter of mechanical birds. There's a voice, but it's just a bit-crushed fragment of a word, maybe "Feel," repeated every bar; the measured, studiously unswung groove is a steady plod of eighth, quarter and 16th notes. There are no moments of rupture—no turning point, no climax, no denouement. Just a long, agonizing liftoff fueled by bloodcurdling bass rumble, so low it seems to be bending space around it, an effect made audible in the detuned ride cymbals above.
If "Zone" feels like the introduction to a story that never gets told, "Luv Zombie" offers a more teasing interplay between tension and release. This time it's a looped female vocal, "I'm addicted," strung out over gurgling, mercurial chords and not much else; it takes 42 bars before she can get past the stammer and finish the thought, "… to you." There's a disconnect between the heat in her voice and the ice water in the track's veins—you might say he puts the "cry" in "cryogenic." This time, Elgato makes more concessions to the dance floor, with snapping, syncopated snares and deep 808 accents, but, as before, he's concerned primarily with hammering out a hiccup of time into something infinite. Three minutes in, our unrequited lover simply disappears, leaving us with a denouement nearly twice as long—and the lingering sensation that she was never there at all.
Tracklist A Zone
B Luv Zombie