On London Zoo, the 2008 album from Kevin Martin's experimental dub project the Bug, one of the most nimble and beguiling tracks, "You & Me", was voiced by light-stepping Trinidadian singer-poet Roger Robinson. After that track, Martin and Robinson joined forces as King Midas Sound and followed with the 2009 full-length Waiting for You. Their latest project is a series of four EPs collaborating with an outside artist, beginning with this release with Austrian guitarist-composer Christian Fennesz.
Those familiar with Martin’s brand of concussive dub and Fennesz’s elegant dance between electronic glitches and dulcet guitar washes might be taken aback by the hushed tones of this pairing. There’s very little of Martin’s telltale drum programming, while Fennesz’s singular guitar tone is hard to parse amid the hash of gray static that envelops almost everything here. Kiki Hitomi, who previously lent her voice to both the Bug and a KMS remix, does her best Beth Gibbons impersonation on the melancholic trip hop of "On My Mind", but its one of the few tracks with a discernible pulse. Robinson whispers a line about "hold[ing] each other tight" but everything about his voice on the record suggests the phantasmal, a now-departed ex-lover who returns only in a dream. When he slurs about searching for safe ground on the eerie "Lighthouse" it seems to have been recorded from inside an abandoned one.
Edition 1 mimics the depression and subsequent grind and quiet desolation of a breakup so precisely that it's hard to take in all at once. And while the effect of such distant vocals works early on in the album, by the back half, it just sounds like every vocal was recorded over a poor cell phone connection, tinny and small. Robinson details the depression of a breakup in maddeningly mundane detail, muttering about going through the days in a "weed fog"; subliminal rhythms fade in and out but the expected bass surge never arrives. The album fully comes to life only on the haunting 14-minute instrumental "Above Water".
The dark melodic guitar elements on the record sound like Fennesz, but very little else is instantly traceable to him. Much of his discography involves collaboration with distinct artists like Ryuichi Sakamoto, Jim O’Rourke, and Sparklehorse, but what’s remarkable here is how Fennesz dissolves into the bleak landscape, his signature sound rendered indistinct, a loss of identity that mirrors the album's main theme.
