Berlin-based producer and DJ Felix Krone comes across as well-adjusted enough in interviews, but if you're looking at only the smattering of records he has released since debuting under the name Felix K in the late '90s, he seems to nurse a dark streak. In some senses, that was par for the course of the bare, monochromatic drum and bass exercises that have populated many of his releases. Over the past couple of years, the man has morphed into a kitchen-sink sort of tinkerer, with one hand still dedicated to the rapid-fire clicks and thumps of the now-aging sphere he came up in. But he's casually embraced a whole host of genres with similarly downcast dispositions: brittle blasts of noise, desolate stretches of ambient composition, the thunderous foreboding bass work of dub. On Tragedy of the Commons, Krone engages single-mindedly with those gloomy impulses and crafts a uniquely bleak release fitting of its home on the London-based purveyors of all things Cimmerian Blackest Ever Black.
Much of this EP's runtime is taken up by the title track, an expansive ambient piece that manages to be his most striking meditation on melancholia yet. Devoid of the jittery percussion that's marked most of his work, he's free to indulge in more abstract composition. Bleary smears of off-kilter arpeggios and thunderous bass blasts that give a sense of immediacy to the track's delirious plod and found sound samples of ghostly chatters and creaks lend a bodily terror to the piece. Beyond the purely cinematic horror of many darker ambient works, Krone adds details that give "Tragedy of the Commons" a sense of a real physical space, a grimy sort of environment that becomes more unsettling the more you explore it.
At its 17-and-a-half-minute length, the murk and mire of "Tragedy of the Commons" could have easily collapsed in on itself, but as static-y samples and slurred synth lines continually edge their way into the mix, it manages to earn its monumental length. Despite the fact that Krone is used to using drums to give shape and form to his tracks, he's still able here to give an amorphous piece some narrative weight. He demonstrates a knack for casually adding more and more moving parts to the mix, spinning details off one another to reshape the structure into fresh, unfamiliar forms across the track's whole runtime. It's an approach he picks back up on the B-side too. And though the drums return for the shorter piece "Silent Money", he's still scrambling tenebrous synthesizer parts and spoken-word samples as the track proceeds, making even the more familiar structures of that work hard to fully apprehend.
Marginally less essential is the collection's closer, a thunderous rave-up called "Fundamentals" that's credited as a remix by the unknown quantity Onar Anxiety. Billowing noise is pinned down instead here by a pummeling drum loop that doesn't relent for more than a few moments of the track's six minutes, and it settles into a more static sort of horror that underscores Tragedy of the Commons' dynamic high points. Felix K is still working with the same black-and-white palette that's colored his whole career. But in stretching out and working in a more explicitly formless mode, he's granted more freedom to play with a more fully developed vision of instrumental darkness than ever before.
