This is not a split release, but an album of two co-composed tracks by two apparently very diverse artists. Canadian artist Holzkopf is mainly known for his leftfield take on drum’n’bass and improvised vocals, while EMERGE is often labelled a “drone ambient” artist. Here, they combine their respective mastery of synths and the processing of sampled ambient sounds to create two textural, yet highly suspenseful half-hour pieces.

The track titles “masonry” and “metallurgy” give the listener some clues as two the sources of the sounds used. Y-Ton-G, a long-standing presence in the German underground experimental music scene and close collaborator of Asmus Tietchens, is credited with supplying some of the source material for EMERGE’s samples, and given Y-Ton-G’s predilection for the sounds of metal, these probably gave shape to the samples featured on “metallurgy.”

This is not to say that any of this music sounds at all anecdotal. The great achievement of the album is in the way it manages to combine seemingly concrete, referential sounds with abstract, brooding frequencies. The mixture of found and sythesised sounds, some of them by Holzkopf and others supplied by mutual label mate and analogue-synth noisician ORiFiCE, creates a kind of cinema for the ear which conjures emotionally compelling atmospheres while never forcing any obvious visual associations on the listener.

Credits:
HOLZKOPF (synth, samples)
EMERGE (treated samples by Y-TON-G & ORiFiCE)
mastered by XNDL & EMERGE
cover art by Claus Poulsen (artwerk.menneske.dk)
design by EMERGE