POP "Work Hard Play Harder"
Absurd | #31 | CD-R | 2003

A few years long cooperation between laptop noise guru Zbigniew Karkowski, and one of the main men behind famous Mego, Peter Rehberg aka Pita has borne fruits once again. The debut release 'Album' on Tochnit Aleph was a set of excerpts from their live recordings and was characterized by general loud and solid wall of sound. 'Work Hard Play Harder' continues the motive only in the opening track. 'Original Version' is a joint effort of Karkowski and Rehberg. In over 20 minutes both musicians turn sets, and push keys on their machines to do their best in generating, and manipulating noises of all kinds - from almost static, vibrating blocks, through harsh noise, nebullas of clicks & cuts to massive japnoise in-flows. Surely, the entire work is simultanously processed and manipulated - constant sound fluctations, distortions etc. give the music a feeling of motion. The 2 nd track 'Zbigniew Version' suggests it's Karkowski's remix of the previous track, curtailed to 7 minutes - he filters the wall of sound in order to throw out low and middle frequences, slows down, or speed ups sounds, and makes the changes happen faster than in the initial material, which results in sinusoidal physics of sounds, vibrating feedbacks, and drilling high tones. Rehberg's vision of 'Original Version' named 'Pita Version' is even more radical than Zbigniew's - the track loses all its noise features - reduced to 7 minutes, it's transformed into amorphic, ionizing fog with all manageries of sonic fractals. A piece with no start, and no end... My final conclusions towards new POP stuff are quite positive. I have partiality for Karkowski's works, both solo as well as collaborations. 'Work Hard.' pleases me, but gives no hints of discovering a terra incognita. Which is fair enough, I guess, if you think how many releases he's perpetrated recently...

[krzysztof sadza]