AGF/Delay: Explode
AGF Producktion

Explode sounds light years removed from AGF's (Antye Greie-Fuchs) earlier Head Slash Bauch. While the latter is an often dense, sometimes claustrophobic, album of cyborg electronica, Explode is sparse, the album largely comprised of drum and vocal duets with her voice nakedly unadorned. Issued as a collaboration between 'poem producer' AGF and Vladislav Delay, its minimal, uncluttered sound represents an equally radical departure from the latter's earlier Multila and Entain releases, not to mention an even greater change from the recent Demo(n)tracks. There is still a dub dimension but one now stripped to a simple bass and drum core. The drum-voice settings are like sparse dialogues or collages, enhanced subtly by organ and electronics with the songs often resembling stream-of-consciousness sketches.

It bears noting that the two purposefully contrived the album to deviate from the established styles of their solo recordings. Explode's material originated in north Finland during the summer of 2004 with the duo inspired by solitude, silence, and the stillness of nature. As a result, the album's lyrical content often deals with human issues in direct and intimate manner (like “Slow Living,” a paean to the clarity slowed pace brings) though some songs explore more public and political themes. AGF's vocal in “Explode Baby,” the most provocative case, is apparently an improvisation she recorded after learning about the female suicide bomber Hanadi Dschadarat whose Haifa bombing took the lives of 22 people and her own. Appropriately, the song is instrumentally unsettling with repetitive drum hits giving it an industrial character. Early in the piece, AGF seems to express bewilderment over the act (“Explode baby / For your reasons”); by its end, some degree of empathy and glimmer of understanding appears to emerge (“To explode for a reason / To explode for mistakes / To explode around the world / To make out a point”) though, having discerned the motivations for the act, the change registers tentative comprehension though not necessarily approval or endorsement. Ambivalence is documented: amazement for its ruthless calculation coupled with fascination over the determination and fearlessness of the bomber's conviction.

The album was formally recorded in fall 2004 in Berlin, with the two deliberately nurturing an organic feel and welcoming the intrusion of chance and human error over machine-like perfection. The opener “Do Protest” establishes the general sound with a sparse noir setting of lurching dub-inflected rhythms and organ drone accompanied by AGF's sprechgesang vocal style. Songs typically feature skeletal arrangements—“A Distant View” is no more than a gentle vocal and enveloping synth base—though some are more elaborate. With amorphous synth smears draped over propulsive drum slams, “Recorded,” for instance, is louder and denser, reminiscent of their customary styles, while the propulsive “Break Doors” includes drums, organ, bass, electronics, and string plucks alongside AGF's multi-tracked vocals. “Distributor” layers a vocal chant (“Your love is a one in a million”) over a churning industrial base; strangely, the expressive multi-vocal treatment suggests AGF's been listening to Sade (another song even includes the repeating line “Smooth Operator”). The songs are rooted stylistically in minimal dub, with reverb and echo applied liberally throughout too.

While Explode may seem an odd title choice for an album of such restrained intimacy, it subtly suggests the quietly revolutionary world view espoused by its creators who, in their own words, “don't care what flag we are traveling under.”

April 2005