Kaf – s-Hun [IO Records, 2021-02-10]
To assemble our weekly news, we visit Bandcamp each Saturday, using some filters, and selecting our weekly top #3 among some twenty releases. However, when we see one from IO Records, it’s a no-brainer that we include it in our selection, as if we were victims of some sort of hypnotism.
IO Records, this is the youth of Munich, a group of friends who have a very authentic approach to music and infinite talent, producing constantly fresh deep sounds.
Kaf, in particular, is among the best artists of the label (although “they are all” among the best artists of the label). Being also a sound designer at Impulse Audio Lab, he polishes the sound like no one else, designing the melodious and percussive layers with great subtlety. It’s however Niklas Bühler, another expert of the crew, who handled the mastering of this release: the result is astonishing, with a fabulous render of the spatial imaging and a sublime crystallisation of the sound.
While the intro is resolutely cinematic, reminding the sound of the score composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (Arrival) (RIP), the following tracks create an interesting variation around a percussive and foggy atmospheric guideline, resulting in a very consistent journey along the whole EP. Epsilon, Dycide and MTRL understood very well the essence of it and closed the EP with their remixes without departing from what Kaf has initiated. Simply fabulous.
WRITING BY: CEDRIC FINKBEINER | 14 FEBRUARY 2021