Der Ohlsen
"Imagine you're standing alone in the broken ruins of a discotheque, surrounded by smoke and fire, but someone right beside you tingles your brain with weird ASMR noises. For fans of The Bug and YouTubers rumbling yoghurt pot caps next to your ear drum."
Kirril is a dark industrial music producer from Groningen, The Netherlands. Heavily inspired by a chaotic lifestyle involving squatting and illegal parties, Kirril started working on music with second hand gear, sometimes found on the side of the road or in squatted buildings: Old 90’s computers, cassette decks, beaten up pianos and broken down mixers.
Living in squats sometimes meant living without electricity, making time to make music sparse and fragmented by mainly focusing on short loops, quick fragments and tracks to use live. After a period of squatting, Kirril gained experience in sound design for movies and theater as a mix engineer for bands, and making obscure, dark dance music for illegal events. All of this combined with the various musical skill sets of various collaborators were important elements in the development of Kirril’s sound. But the goal remained the same: To make bleak, dystopian, dark psychedelic music, inspired by the turbulent nightlife.
This all results in a body of work that does not fit into one category: sometimes dark and melancholic, sometimes collapsing onto itself in glitched out and industrial influenced madness.
Kirril’s Self Titled album on Tartarus Records sees him shifting to a more atmospheric and eclectic style than his other recent work. A foggy, psychedelic and layered experience that uses hip hop and broken techno rhythms, combined with psychedelic synths and noise to make industrial beats. Taking its influences from styles as diverse as early industrial, rhythmic noise to modern hip hop and psychedelic downtempo.
The first ideas for this album started coming in a Berlin hotel room, inspired by traveling during a global pandemic. Coming home, the usual nightlife had come to a grinding halt. Growing feelings of isolation contrasted with perverse, drug and alcohol fuelled private gatherings during lockdown influencing the atmosphere of the album further.
Kirril’s Self Titled album combines all these influences into a spacious, hallucinogenic trip that leaves you claustrophobic in discomfort.
Edition of 100 cassettes housed in a cardstock case.
"things get significantly jazzier than on Antediluvian without sacrificing any of the shattering drone doom heaviness. But with many contributions from one of his partners in Mansur, Dmitry el Demerdashi on oud and jack of all saxophone trades Colin Webster, these Meditations sound less like a global sound collage than its predecessor, and more like a coherent band."
my full review:
https://derohlsen.blogspot.com/2022/11/cassette-craze-chronicles-xxii-feat.html Der Ohlsen
Fantastically punishing glitch, noise, and industrial from this New York musician that puts drum & bass through a blender. Bandcamp New & Notable Jan 25, 2021
For this LP, Formen modified old 16bit effects units which were then cascaded via internal patch points to develop a glitchy sound. Bandcamp New & Notable Dec 18, 2021