String

*123 copies limited edition!!* *cassette edition of sold out vinyl* Properly absorbing electronic enigmas from Zaheer Gulamhusein (Xvarr, Waswaas) and JustinTripp (Georgia), following their noses down the rabbit hole into aether-chamber interzonesadjacent to Coil, Conrad Schnitzler, Werkbund, and Jeff Mills’ deep space missions. A strong case of two artists transcending the sum of their parts, String present an immersiveexploration of the unknown, realising a “virtual vacation” from which they never returned. Theirquest somehow made it into the mitts of Hamburg’s V I S, where it follows the label’s Ditterich vonEulberg-Donnersberg (Werkbund) album with uniquely engaging findings from the brink; eighttracks rendered in swirling sci-fi noir tones, siren-like chorales and plangent off-planet padsscried with a kosmiche twinkle in their 3rd eye. In other words: the sort stuff you may well havecome to these pages for.

In its elusive fluidity and unfathomably spatialized scope, we find the duo fusing to project asound that, without prior notice, would be difficult to attribute to either artist. There are no doubttraces of Zaheer’s new age toned work as Xvarr and the microtonal shimmer of Waswaas, andlikewise Tripp’s mutant sensibilities carried over from Georgia, but they’re distilled to a darkersubstance than anything we’d come to expect.

It’s not so much gothic dark, more dark as in full of negative space, with a richly meditativeappeal that threads their hardware improvisations from the Millsian deep space intrigue of ‘PhaseTransition’ thru the eldritch eeriness of ‘World Line’, to the illusive choral motifs of ‘Fringe’ andoceanic abstraction of ‘From the End to the Beginning’, with glimmers of a more lush, idealistichope in ‘Plus Operator’ and the cinematic ‘Degrees of Freedom’ that beautifully moderate thejourney.