Fractured by Mariam Rezaei

Recorded live in one take using various creative turntablist techniques, 'FRACTURED' is a snapshot of Mariam Rezaei's emotional state as she peers out from her studio at the "fucked up" world beyond the walls. Like its incendiary predecessor 'BOWN', the album torches genre boundaries, melting down punk, breakcore, electroacoustic music, Eurodance, avant-rock, grime, hip-hop and free noise until unprecedented contours begin to appear. This time, Rezaei's teeth are fully bared - if 'BOWN' skewered stuffy outside perceptions of her craft, 'FRACTURED' challenges and dares to confront not just the technical constraints of her process, but the meaning behind popularity, nostalgia and experimentation during a time of chaos. Blithe and refreshingly raw, it's a cracked, cacophonous soundtrack to a deafeningly broken era.

Rezaei has been developing her own style of turntablism since she was a teenager, and rethinks the formula from its base elements, contrasting samples and genre identifiers, and analyzing her own signature techniques. Using two to four turntables at a time, she employs free juggling, turntable sines (controlling sine waves using the pitch slider), turntable quartets, needle dripping and needle weaving - two new methods she debuts on 'FRACTURED'. The former involves composing music made specifically for needle dropping on multiple decks at a once ('jaw'). The latter is a way of using a digital vinyl system to loop music live using two decks, with nothing predetermined. "Once released from the loops," she explains, "the music continues to play forwards, never reversing back - ALWAYS FALLING FORWARDS." We can hear this clearly on 'cut', a blistering collaboration with European experimental trio MOPCUT, aka vocalist Audrey Chen, guitarist Julian Desprez and percussionist Lukas König. Working from a "quick recording of a soundcheck," Rezaei doesn't exactly deconstruct the band's clatter of elasticated croaks, itchy rhythms and angular guitars, but interrupts its logic, looping and multiplying each element to push everything off course.

She uses the same process on 'vengabussed', but the result is completely different. Here, inspired by Eliane Radigue electronics and Suzanne Ciani's revelatory synthesizer experiments, Rezaei contorts the melody from Vengaboys' 1998 hit 'We Like To Party!', turning it into an unrecognizably elegiac meditation on nostalgia and hedonism. The more eccentric side of the dancefloor is illuminated on 'Weirdo club musics', a "massive big up to the weirdos that go clubbing to anything" that showcases Rezaei's labyrinthine turntable drumming and an unexpected vocoded turn from Elvin Brandhi, and she tries and fails to adhere to the 4/4 template on 'going straight (and fucking it up)'. "It always bores the hell out of me and feels totally fake as fuck" she admits, shadowing Aphex Twin's iconic 'Windowlicker' with her chattering juggled beats and metallic prangs. Rezaei thinks back to a stimulating conversation with double bassist and composer Joëlle Leandre on 'the rage (for Joëlle)', using that fury to energize a gritty tonal experiment that funnels samples of Stewart Smith's guitar playing through various distortion pedals.

And Rezaei's electronically-enhanced voice materializes on the long finale 'animosity', chopped and screwed to draw out its thrumming, weightless intensity. Contrasting the rest of the album's relative bluster, it's a rare moment of tranquility that provides space to consider the over-arching themes. Rezaei's perception of genre might be fragmented, but 'Fractured' sprawls out like a mosaic, where every component part adds color, shape and physicality to an ornate whole.

NA

Instagram