Ján Peter Háber | 14.12.2021 |
Behind the Tangent Strategy project is a mysterious musician in a plague mask, who calls himself a chd.y. He has been making music since about 1996. From the beginning, he used a mix of guitars, bass guitars and percussion. Gradually, however, he switched to sequencers and samples. He also had live performances in USA in Seattle and Washington, in year 2005, but then he withdrew from the stage. In 2013, the chd.y. has moved to Japan, directly to the capital Tokyo. On his webpage in his discography, he has first release is dating back to 2001, with a note that he composed the music a year earlier in Birmingham, UK. Several later albums and ep’s can be purchased at the bandcamp for a very nice price. It’s a pity that not all of them are there.
The album Revenant (Resurrection), that has recently been released by EK Product, is the first official release of Tangent Strategy. There are also a few older songs on it. Musically, the album is very raw. Nihilistic uncompromising music gnawed to the bone. Minimalistic compositions with a prevailing sound and mostly strongly distorted vocals. This album is not an easy bite at all. Only for real connoisseurs. If you like bands like Chrysalide, Ambassador21, or maybe The Peoples Republic of Europe, you will definitely enjoy yourself. Strict synthetic underlays are supported by various types of beats. The noise bath falling to the rhythm’n’ noise sounds like a solid mess from the beginning. The album has no technoid tendencies. The songs have more punk footage. And although they are minimalist, they are not repetitive and not boring at all. This is also due to the vocals, which give the sound structures a more song-like character. Chd.y himself describes his compositions as sound sculptures. You can identify with that. Under the statue, we usually imagine that it depicts the human body, or at least part of it.
The creation of Tangent Strategy could also be included in Harsh Electronic Body Music. And that body is made of very old reinforced concrete. Iron is corroding and pieces of eroded concrete fall directly on your head, into which you are constantly hammered by a pneumatic hammer. A real dystopian piglet for the whole year. The motifs of the lyrics are, of course, darker, blacker than night. Sometimes they indulge in contrasts. Please note, a highly addictive thing. Especially when you gradually start to orientate yourself in surgical work with surprisingly melodic noise. Hypnotic keyboard lines sometimes help a lot, and in spite of everything the emphasis on rhythm. Tangent Strategy together with EK Product has really given its best. The sound is adorned to the last detail. I warn you, you will gradually become addicted to this album. And you won’t even understand why. A mature crossover of related styles mixed in the right proportions with love and hate, arduousness and contempt. It acts as a lighthouse, a fulcrum in the dark. But don’t wait for the light. You get a solid brainwash and you either will play it in excitement once again, or you will take a short break to regenerate. You just won’t get this attempt from the mysterious chd.y. out of your head easily. Most of the songs are vocalized in English, in some you can also hear sampled Japanese.
And in the final it’s even sexy. Nourishing dose of industrial which doesn’t play for anything. In the current sound, he elegantly returns to the roots of the genre. And that is very valuable today.