Review: Komare – untitled C30 series (self-released, Jun–Aug)

Except for their Got to Stop Me / Hot Tarmac 7″, I’ve written about everything Komare has put out since they first coalesced in late 2018, so while I always try to keep things varied, at this point it feels like a tradition. Comprising two of the three (former) members of Mosquitoes, it and its sister project evolved in parallel, beginning at corresponding origin points loosely planted in conventional genre idioms and burrowing ever deeper, often symbiotically, into total abstraction. So when the beloved trio announced they were calling it quits, the future of Komare seemed up in the air, even though the masterful Grace to Breathe That Void would have been a fitting dénouement. Fastforward two years, though, and we clearly had nothing to fear… besides the usual, of course. This microedition tape trilogy quietly dropped this summer, each one offering two fifteen-minute sides of brand new material. Peter Blundell and Dominic Goodman went back to the laboratory for these recordings, embracing the unpolished experimentation of their self-titled cassette while retaining the gloom-smeared radical minimalism of the more recent releases. One imagines the pair of musicians crammed into a tiny closet studio, assorted electronics strewn across a shared table, Blundell twiddling effects knobs and babbling into a mic while Goodman stitches tattered sound-fabrics both harmonic and textural. These meditations are not exactly cold, more just sparse and shadowy; however, I still hesitate to call them “jams” (even though it’s not a totally inaccurate descriptor) because each track is always steadily headed toward something, never satisfied with even the most deconstructed “groove,” sliding down an unforgiving slope or spiraling toward a pitch-dark nexus. KOM/01 is the duo’s most stripped-down work yet, distilling the typical toolkit into a handful of obsidian awls and pliers. The shattered glass climax of side B carries over into the second tape, which writhes with throbbing analog delay and wracking high frequencies—the boundary between utterance and electronic synthesis breaks down entirely. And KOM/03 is perhaps the most active of the three: Blundell’s mutters almost approach intelligible language, ambiguous globules hang on shivering threads. I’m not sure exactly where Komare is headed after this, but you can’t go wrong with a flashlight and a teddy bear in the emergency pack.