Barnt - Is This What They Were Born For?

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  • Is This What They Were Born For? sees Magazine co-founder Barnt return to home turf for the first time since 2010's hypnotic, kosmische-inflected What Is a Number, That a Man May Know It? Recent releases on the Cologne imprint from Wolfgang Voigt and The Field under his Loops Of Your Heart alias have explored drone and ambient forms, and Barnt treads similar boards with the mournful "U R D J," a beatless interlude with a clunky elegiac quality. Elsewhere, though, he takes us by the hand and leads us firmly back onto the dance floor. "All Worlds All Times" is built around a slinky house loop, but before long heavily reverbed synth-string figures are spiralling up and down in curiously stiff, chromatic fashion, smothering the percussion; in the latter half, it's the turn of a MIDI flute to describe awkward melodic arcs in the foreground. Barnt's synth work has often recalled the kosmische pioneers of old, and its Teutonic rigidity can be endearing. Here though, it makes for an uneasy hybrid of a track, infused with kitsch foreboding but suffering from a jarring disconnect between its various constituent parts. The title track is more effective. Opening with a coruscating synth chorale, it soon flowers into a slow-paced, bombastic epic, all plastic tom fills and rigid hi-hats. Clean, ever-present drones and more kitschy melodics supply the long-form narrative; later on, rapidly alternating notes are overlaid with strange glooping effects, simultaneously pompous and comical, before the whole thing descends into directionless squiggles in the closing minutes. A lumpen proposition, sure, but one with the potential to be transportative.
  • Tracklist
      A1 All Worlds All Times A2 U R D J B Is This What They Were Born For
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