11.8.21 by Matty McPherson
“Where I End and You Begin” is both the title of a Radiohead track as much as it is the perennial descriptor phrase when talking about Asemix’s legendary debut Asemix. More Eaze and Nick Zanca came from two vastly different spheres. They may have never met in the flesh to date, yet they’ve struck up a collaborative partnership over COVID, intermingling through the ol’ Slovenian TMT-affiliated outpost Warm Winter Ltd. Their debut features both of their respective sound palettes (Zanca has left heady breadcrumbs regarding the pop and sonic influences) in such a seamless lock that radiates a luminescent quality to it.
The blurring of the lines between the two leaves the album in a floaty, spacious black hole. It’s a space where improvisation and rehearsed composition, as well as minimalism and maximalism could be one and the same. Their long form pieces were crafted out of field recordings and synth odysseys and other various dirges thrown through digital patches. When it came out on the other side, it unexpectedly carries that feeling of a dialogue from a distant starship’s black box. One that is all shiny and computer controlled–but just absolutely on the fritz of collapsing in on its own coded responses. Scatterbrained, in the good way.
It even recalled Dainel Wyche’s “The Last Flight of the Voidship Remainder,” but that was a loud guitar-based sonic music–and my comparison is more chance coincidence than surefire fact. Zanca and Maurice are DAW-heads and their synth oriented bleeps n’ bloops can more often than not move down tantalizing low-end oriented pathways. The way a ghostly aberration forms out of the lights of “Phantom Lung,” how those synths rupture and bubble on “Rehearsal Earthquake,” how an underlying bass line channels into a crescendo on “Communal Nude,” even the overarching manner as to how damn whirly the tape sounds! It all moves it beyond a mere monotonous exercise and into a subconscious deep listening exercise. There is a brevity and curiosity imbued that makes it one of the most enticing emo-ambient listens in recent memory.
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