The average music savvy already knows that a great deal of the most interesting electronic music is coming out of latin american countries. With Mexico and Argentina at he first wave of experimentalists, we now have to include Colombia, because of artists like David Velez, aka Lezrod. David started his jouney of micro-ambient electronica right here at Zymogen, with 'Retorno a la Nada', a mutant body of glitchy drones and jazz-inspired compositions. But Lezrod's music isn't static, it's always evolving and shapeshifting into something that completely mirrors the artist's complex personality. David is also a big music lover, of all kinds. So it's not surprising that eventually he would ask some of his friends, also music artists that David respects, to do something together.
'Data Transfer' is the result of a combined work led out by Lezrod and his friends, where chunks of music information were transfered electronically back and forth, between Lezrod's hometown Bogota and other distant places like Darren McClure's Japanese home, Gurdonark's Texas prairie, Stephen's Ohio and Fgmcvp's Florida beaches, the latter being a personal friend of David from Colombia. All music pieces were assembled by Lezrod and this party of artists that he admires. Darren McClure, one of David's recent musical discoveries, was responsible for the work on four out of the seven tracks that make this album. 'Data Transfer' is also Lezrod's most 'low profile' work to date. Maybe the fact that these weren't meant to be solo tracks, made him hide a bit from his sometimes brutal approaches to composition. Darren's collaboration is a perfect example of that. His microtonal walls of sound, completely dampen Lezrod's glitches, without making them disappear, taming them, taking control of the narrative. 'North Coast' and 'Masato' are personal favorites and possibly the best work these two artists had made until this day. Two delicate soundworks, built up from huge microstructures with complex rhythms of bleeps and glitches, bonding together into heavy and hazy waves of drones. I could listen to this all day and just leave my brain idling. Stephen Walter and Gurdonark pieces are pretty different from McClure's ones. Walter's 'Ramute' is a short piece of drum'n'bass-like fuzzy beats with melodic and hypnotic tones glued on top. Gurdonark's 'Final Dub' has a chamber kind of ambience feel, with lots of noisy layers piled up and heavily delayed, Kingston flavored. 'Opitas', Lezrod's tribute to his colombian mate and old college friend Fgmcvp, is perhaps the most Lezrod-kind of track. It reminds me of other tracks he has made, namely the ones from 'Retorno a la Nada'. Not surprinsingly, because Fgmcvp is credited as David's mentor when it comes to music production.
David has compiled here a great selection of collaborative work that will be remembered and tresured for years to come. There aren't many artists with such relatively short careers making music with this quality and density. Zymogen can indeed be proud of putting out releases like this. And from this side, we can only be thankful for that.
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