Artist: skad.
Album: ICE
I have been listening to a lot of this Russian artist in the past month since discovering him over on VK, their social network equivalent of Facebook.
skad. produces a dark ambient, synthwave/witch house vibe with purely digital instruments.
The beauty of productions like skad.’s ICE 4-track EP is in the attention to detail and the entire audio experience.
You get sinister grooves, a rhythmic arpeggio/harp, and of course, great big fat layers of synthesizers, which are made more claustrophobic using audio compression. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, listen to the second track, “phase,” with headphones on and wait to get dizzy when the track pulses in and out on the kick drum.
Then you have a track like “spark,” which sounds like a heavy trap track without the mumble rap vocals to water it down. What you get is a steady musical kick to the gut. It is urban, gritty, dark.
The entire journey ends in the ambient “endless pain,” which could very well be the soundtrack to a climactic movie scene where the hero dies in bitter glory, or the gladiator is reunited with his kidnapped wife. skad. takes a beautiful chord pattern, erases all hint of drums, and quite simply, breaks your heart with its minimal grandeur. You don’t want it to end, even though you know it has to.
Sounds like: Fans of 4AD artists like Lisa Gerrard, and Dead Can Dance will absolutely love skad. The music possesses the same fragile sadness. But also the same solid power.
Fave track: “endless pain” for the way it lifts you at the end.
LINKS
- Stream/download the album on Bandcamp – “name your price”
- skad. on Soundcloud
- skad. on VK
AudioStylites 