WOEBOT

ARKSTAR
INDIVIDUAL ELECTRIC PITCH CIFTE MODULATORS
ISH

Emerging from Switzerland’s Jazz group Freeform Arkestra, Arkstar peddle a pallid yet loyal 70’s Jazz Funk, one cybernetically decontextualised within the digital domain. If you come expecting the volcanic sounds of Sun Ra as their name suggests, prepare to be disappointed even if you’re ready to accept a verisimilitude to Sonny Blount’s entryist works like “UFO” or “Nuclear War”. A perhaps unintended side effect of their one-way love affair with jazz is that on “Individual Electric Pitch Cifte Modulators” they end up voguely sounding like a Post-Punk revival act with chops, a comparison they might find flattering.

Initially their bare-knuckled sound does resonate with the William Burroughs quote that MC Dario De Nicola (who rather unpleasantly boasts of having murdered someone called Beaumont) relays in his spoken-word intro; “Take off your skin and dance around your bones”. The cauterised drum patterns and chicken-scratch guitar are disconnected aurally from one another like the femurs and ribs in an animated Ray Harryhausen skeleton, but sadly as the tracks progress this impact diminishes and one’s left struggling with lesser minor-key tunes like “Electro People of the Sun” and the almost cornily monikered “Jazzpunk”. It’s churlish to take them to task for their English but this critic couldn’t resist a giggle at Arkstar’s press release that charmingly promises a feast of “sizzling synthesiser” and “squeaking guitars”.

At its best, on tracks like “Dee B Boy” and “Arkstar”, with their fairly convincing Italo grooves “Individual Electric Pitch Cifte Modulators” impresses but gradually the oppressive cleanliness of the music, and its emotionless surfaces, becomes wearisome. Style, especially when second-hand, is never a strong enough raison-d’etre for a music.