Tolga Fidan - Venice / Tambulistan
Perhaps in this age of microgenre and marketing category, all one needs to do is to corner a market, and carve out a niche. Everybody decries pigeonholing, but (tacitly) we all know it’s the road (or crevice) to success. It doesn’t really matter which one. A film-making friend of mine may be right – there’s absolutely no point compromising your creative vision these days, if you’ve got effective distribution. Hell, I’ve been to 12k gigs in Tokyo crammed to the gills with microsound geeks, all of them ready to record the show with their mini-disc players. Now that’s a freakshow.
Vakant have their slot sorted too – ominous, dry, digital sounding minimal/techno. The names of the producers even sound to my Anglo-Saxon ears like those of vampires: Mathias Kaden, Onur Özer, Tolga Fidan. Fidan’s Venice/Tambulistan follows hot on the shiny black heels of Özer’s Red Cabaret EP, which everyone else seemed to like but me. First listens (while washing dishes) made me think, “hey, they’ve sent me Özer’s EP again by mistake”. But no, it’s different, just the same.
Just like Red Cabaret, the A-side is full of noises that seem to have come from flipping through VST patches. Once something sufficiently menacing is found (black horns, icy strings, something scaly and slithering), a two-note minor interval or an arabesque/creepy/ancient-sounding melody is mixed in, and there’s your track. Pardon my cynicism, but I hope the artlessness of this is remedied by the dancefloor impact. Anyway, there’s lots of cool, spooky ideas here that are thrown into the cauldron for good effect, and I think it’d sound great mixed into something incongruously “happy and gay”. The B-side, “Venice’” is rhythmically more interesting, vibrating with little ideas and intrusive hits and hisses. I guess you can’t fault the novelty, really – with only one or two other labels making horror house minimal (Underl_ne and Perlon [in its dark moments]) this record has a very distinctive sound/feel that, like all monsters, is equally repulsive and attractive.