Chris Korda — More Than Four
This is what house would sound like if it was made by Miles Davis?
When Chris Korda invented Church Of Euthanasia thirty years ago with the slogan "Save Your Planet, Kill Yourself", it placed him in the line of dangerous lunatics in the style of Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple. Today, the screaming anti-natalism of the American trickster no longer makes such an impression. Time has done its job: contemporary ecologists are sometimes so radical in their ideas that the shocking slogans from three decades ago no longer seem interesting. Fortunately, the opposite is true of the music of a descendant of famous Hungarian filmmakers.
When the first recordings of Korda were released - he was already a woman and he was choking on club hedonism. "Sex Is Good" proclaimed the title of his debut album from 1998, placing itself in the formula of a perverse combination of electro and house, which a moment later was called "electroclash". On the wave of this fashion, Korda recorded two albums for DJ Hell, which in fact, compared to the then achievements of Fisherspooner or Miss Kittin and The Hacker, were quite pale. No wonder that the American woman collapsed the gear and disappeared from the record market for a long 16 years.
Her return in 2019 with the album "Akoko Ajeji" for the German Perlon was a total surprise. This time Korda presented a completely different music: a minimal house with an abstract tone, which sounded as if it had been recorded by a completely different artist than the one responsible for albums from the beginning of the 21st century. It soon turned out that in the meantime Korda devoted herself to studying rhythmic structures and created several computer programs for creating music. All this changed her approach to composing. Another effect of this is her new album - "More Than Four".
The disc opens with a nice nod to Akufen-style micro-house in "Virtue Signal" filled with shredded samples. Ticking, on the other hand, seduces with a swinging rhythm straight from a New York garage, supported by a funky bass parade. "More Than Four" opens a longer segment with an atmospheric deep house, seducing with nostalgic piano chords and prog-rock synthesizer arcade. In "Moonchego", vocoder voices resound unnecessarily, destroying the fleeting mood created by the vibrating arpeggios and the night background. Fortunately, nothing breaks the charm of "Shelter In Bass" and "Pleasant Mistake", where echoes of dub and jazz are heard.
"LCM" is such a little musical break: an exercise in polyrhythm, written for tribal percussion and club beat. The counterpoint to these extravagances turns out to be the most extensive recording in the set - fitting in the formula of the New York Latino-house under the sign of Masters At Work "Charlie's Big Break". The track "Lodidi" turns out to be even more inventive: it starts out like purebred fusion, then turns into house and finally returns to fusion again. At the finale, we get two sophisticated pieces, incorporating minimalist piano variations in the style of Philip Glass into deep-house rhythms - "Kahelo" and "Heard A Moon".
The album is, of course, accompanied by a large philosophical background - its title itself refers to the Miles Davis album from 1966 "Four & More", and the vocal insertions of Korda are dedicated to conspiracy theories and the aforementioned anti-natalism. Not only that: individual pieces are constructed with mathematical precision and reflect their author's experiments with rhythmic divisions thanks to the software he has constructed called Polymeter. But who would care? The music counts, and this one is really great, putting "More Than Four" in the row of the best house records this season.
—Paweł Gzyl
Original Polish text
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