Ziúr - U Feel Anything?

A Closer Listen

Is it too early to declare that 2017 has been a great year for women in electronic music?  Berlin’s Ziúr is only the latest to release a stunning debut album.  The beauty of what we’ve been hearing is that each of these artists has a signature sound, and follows her own muse.

U Feel Anything? is a tale of two albums.  The first half is abstract, abrasive, far from accessible.  The second is a nearly military excursion, dominated by drum patterns and an industrial flavor.  “U” may not feel anything at first, but U will by the time the album ends.

We guarantee no one will say, “Human Life Is Not A Commodity’ is my jam!”  It’s not a jam, but a collection of whispers and words over a backdrop of struck bells and synthesized tones.  The title track offers the first point of access, but its starts and stops may mystify dancers.  Ironically, it’s a cold track, with little clothing to warm the skeletal structure.  Such will come in due time; for now, Ziúr is making her declaration.  Early photos were straightforward; later photos are shrouded, in the manner of Sia and Gazelle Twin, who prefer to be defined by their artistry rather than their appearance.  The same holds true for the music.  Why does it have to be pretty, or polite, or straightforward?  Even the vocals refuse to be pigeonholed, as they meander about, fractured and pitched.  “Body of Light” may be pop ~ it even features a pop singer ~ but it’s not radio music.

The only problem with front-loading the experimental tracks is that few may notice; in the digital age, the disintegration of the album proper means that many will simply go for the highest rated or more accessible.  “Cipher” is the first of these, pure percussion with scribbled electronics, sampled guitar and a melody that sounds like sneakers on a gym floor.  Like the title track, it clocks in at four minutes, the perfect length for a single.  Has Ziúr been holding back?  Of course she has; as a DJ, she’s concerned with the full experience.  “I believe you can only tell that something is harsh when you have a soft side to compare it to,” she writes.  Yet acclimation can strip harshness of its power, which is why the artist offers contrast.  “Don’t Buy It” is as aggressive as it gets, but the following track begins with bells, and seems to include those very words: soft and hard.  Then out of nowhere, a minute and a half to go: a chorus.  The dance floor is now full.

The value of producers such as Ziúr is that they bring something new to the table.  Dissatisfied with the current array of sounds, they find, or invent others.  “Drawn” is distinguished by a carbonated wave, as if the ocean were made of soda.  It once took years for new sounds to filter into the mainstream. We’re going to trace the progress of this one.  In the meantime, we’re sure that Ziúr will be on to something completely different, far before the tipping point has occured.  (Richard Allen)

Tue Oct 03 00:01:27 GMT 2017

Tiny Mix Tapes 80

Ziúr
U Feel Anything?

[Planet Mu/Objects Limited; 2017]

Rating: 4/5

In a recent interview with The Wire, Jlin stressed the need for her music to elicit feelings in the listener, over and above moving them to dance. In her words, “whether you felt good or bad about a track of mine, the point was you felt.” Berlin-based producer Ziúr takes a similar affect-centric approach on her debut album, U Feel Anything?, an album that grabs the listener by the arm and throws them deep into its complex and fervent sonic world. This is an album of extremes — blastbeat percussion and golden-glistening synths, serene pop and ferocious club — but not of oppositions. Rather, it seems best to consider the ways in which Ziúr’s sounds resonate with each other, to trace the ways in which they touch, tease, and collide. Indeed, it often seems easier to describe what Ziúr’s tracks do than how they sound.

Take, for example, “Human Life Is Not A Commodity.” A study in resonance, the track brings together sonorous metallics, rich synth, and sussurating voices, and watches how they ring out, conjoining and overlapping. It’s an opening, or a series of openings, a movement into a wide expanse of sound — a world. Ziúr’s music is often gestural in this way, pointing toward and producing worlds. Its forms are open and contiguous — ecologies of sound, shape, and texture. Just as the listener is thrown into these worlds, the sounds themselves are thrown — stretched and reduced, their edges blurring with the force of the movement.

“Laughing And Crying Are The Same Things (ft. Zhala)” builds its world patiently, forging club sonics into a sinuous, shapeshifting R&B that clicks, hisses, and cracks, bringing free-jazz squall and precise cello vamps into its orbit. Zhala’s vocals nestle deep in the innards of the beat(s), nimbly surfing their peaks and troughs, pining for tactility and contact (“Into your membrane/ I want to rub it all”). This openness — to being touched, to being affected from without — limns the album, bathing it in a haptic potentiality, a porous capacity to explore genres, moods, and spaces. And for the listener, the openness of these sounds means that there can be no place for studied indifference, no outside perspective from which to view this music objectively. One can only be inside, in the yaw, with the sound. The kinds of feelings this music engenders — fear, joy, serenity, pain — and the kinds of movement it hails — contortion, disruption, transformation — are overwhelming, washing over and through us. Time distends as we are subsumed by the squall, the track’s trajectories becoming impossible to discern, the sounds riotous and precise. This music does not ask, it demands.

“Fractals” closes out the album with pealing guitar and a panoply of drum fills, hits, and kicks. The track crackles with lambent energy, shocking to the touch. Its ferocity is surgical, its sounds a network of interests, intentions, and desires, threaded together by sinuous noise. It is sonic kin to Ursula Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction, “full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations.” Ziúr is disinterested in linearity, in finality. Her music is not to be concretized or reified. It communicates its meaning through weight and heft, through the angles of its objects, through force and touch, through unbounded gestures and precise production. As it refracts outward, her sounds trouble the boundaries of club music and experimental composition, playing with them, threading one through the other, creating new grammars of feeling, new structures of movement. Ziúr: “I take [people] on a journey and demand attention; I introduce [them] to a world of me, basically.”

Fri Oct 06 03:58:50 GMT 2017

Pitchfork 71

In her abraded experimental club music, Berlin producer Ziúr favors a skeletal sound that still confidently occupies a maximal amount of space. It suggests that agitation can produce beauty.

Sat Oct 07 05:00:00 GMT 2017