Dutch experimentalist Meelkop's latest continues his now decades-long fascination with abstraction and austerity. A visual artist who painstakingly maps optical illusions into vibrant sonic forms, Meelkop plies his trade under different aliases and throughout an equally diverse number of alliances: as co-founder of the microsound imprint Audion.nl, as a member of radical conceptualist group THU20 and particularly via his longtime association with fellow provocateur Frans de Waard in Goem and Kapotte Muziek. Meelkop retains his given name for material that skirts across various avant bandwidths, but his versatility is nevertheless ably demonstrated by messing about with the off-kilter sub-techno pieces he intermittently concocts under his Slo-Fi guise.
5(zwischenfaelle) continues Meelkop's occasional "series" of tangential numerically-related projects spread out over a handful of labels down the years (Intransitive, Staalplaat, Korm Plastics, Trente Oiseaux), the thematic link frustratingly vague, perversely known only to him. Originally created for use in sound/gallery installations, the nine pieces on hand are neither static nor ambient when played outside of their initial context; rather, Meelkop edits and subtly tweaks the affectations of his noises to achieve a wonderfully spunky canvas of sound.
Whether it's Meelkop's intention to tease us or not is unknown, but the disc's first track's absolute silence for little over a minute makes for an appropriate mission statement, which the artist finally interrupts using a discrete combination of eerie harddrive hiccups and briefly-sprouting bursts of noise. Track three is silent as well (out of the nine pieces here four are silent, Meelkop toying with our perceptions as well as the recording's Gaudi-like architecture, hence the title's numerical affiliation), while track four fairly staggers and shivers, its pregnant pulses assuming a half-organized "rhythm" that comes to a sudden end as well; this is replaced by opaque, referential sounds, faint hisses, crackles, and hums, the lifeforce of long-abandoned devices ebbing away and left to rust on dusty factory floors. The sounds can have a hundred names, a hundred meanings, connote a hundred sensations - whatever is imparted, Meelkop's aim is achieved, and splendidly so.
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