CDT01 by Coup d'état

Coup d’état is a new collaborative project from Australia’s Kane Ikin and Harvey Sutherland. Though one may try to surmise the fruits of this collaboration through the artists’ respective back catalogues, the crucial endeavour that Coup d’état embodies is less to do with capitalizing on their differences than it is with creating a platform for their mutual aesthetic interests. Ikin’s proclivity for vast abstraction tempers, and at times engulfs, Sutherland’s radiance to effect a record that is as overcast as it is iridescent.

Ikin and Sutherland constructed Coup d’état’s first transmission over a twelve-month period between their individual projects and touring schedules. The wandering experimentation of these sessions makes room for Sutherland’s sombre side, found at the periphery of his early catalogue. Ikin’s rhythmic tendencies are given space, too, with the fractal ambience of his last album for 12k gesturing the mood. Last year’s mixtape for Blowing Up The Workshop indicates that his forthcoming work on Type and Latency Recordings should continue to chart this terrain.

Alongside the propulsive, synthetic break-weight and slinky, drum machine minimalism, there is a note of deference to musique concrète as a rhythmic motivator. Never, though, does this give way to deconstruction: Coup d’état are firmly and unselfconsciously within the club. If anything, this deference ambivalently couches their obvious admiration for early experimental synthesis within an infinitely enveloping reverb-space. It’s here that the groove of Sutherland works best, and feels entirely renewed. With the collection of Coup d’état’s titles themselves evoking politics as a depressant, the low-slung, motorik commitment of each track registers as a kind of fortuitous escapism.

Ikin and Sutherland take the ecstatic dysphoria of Basic Channel and shuffle it through Thomas Bangalter’s skulking night drives, leaving enough woozy polyrhythmic mist to cloud the destination. Eventually one realises that the record takes its cues from an alternate universe where the liner notes to Nosferatu OST reveal Giorgio Moroder as the composer.
--
Patrick Quick

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