dreissk the finding CATMD187

Gaming audio director and sound designer Kevin Patzelt brings his dreissk project to n5MD for the release of his debut album, "the finding." dreissk has been touted by the Oakland based imprint as the first in the next-generation of n5MD artists who have been influenced by the label's output. While this could very well be the case, Patzelt has taken his influences and made something as aurally striking as it is emotionally charged without running the risk of peer emulation. Hidden somewhere stylistically between the ambient via bombast juxtaposition of late 90s post-industrial pioneers Gridlock and n5MD's “emotional experiments” archetype, SubtractiveLAD, Patzelt is bound to make quite a splashdown with “the finding." Patzelt mines even further into territories where such diverse artists as Hecq, Bitcrush and Trentemøller have all but ceased to dig and melds these elements seamlessly and skillfully. This artistic archaeology results in Patzelt discovering even greater deposits of aural ore and gems to fuel dreissk. "the finding" has that perfect balance of ambience, grinding rhythms and interwoven guitar work that creates a sub-aquatic blend of Ambient, IDM and Shoegaze, all of which are as poignant as they are emotionally resonant.

Ordering CD/MP3/FLAC direct from n5MD also gets you 3 digital bonus tracks. [Learn more about dreissk...]

igloomag

Undefinable…

It’s not thickened shoegaze, hazy post-industrial, carved ambient/drone or any other media driven genre-tag. The Finding is not past, current or future, nor is it wholly electronic, instrumental, symphonic, emotional or subtle. The Finding doesn’t rely on a formula, template or pre-conceived notion; it’s not just a collection of carefully composed sonic creations, nor a synopsis of n5MD’s thought-provoking direction. The Finding is, in fact, all of the above without being pretentious in any way; it’s a new window of sound ready to be opened and breathed in. A new plateau just over the hill and across the horizon; a careful balance between sheets of textured organics and minimal outbreaks of percussion.

Dreissk (aka Kevin Patzelt, Gaming Audio Director and Sound Sculptor) doesn’t hold back and brings with him a sense of purpose and defined control. Amongst the current n5MD roster, Dreissk sparks a new breed of musical-crossover, blending elements from n5?s past ten years and remoulding them into new shapes that are focused, compelled, and anomalous. With struggle, resistance and clarity, The Finding is a welcomed breeze encompassing a plethora of auditory drenching that sinks into the subconscious and continues to inspire.

With Dreissk’s discipline of engaged acoustic manipulation, The Finding unfolds with reserve and veers left of any stylistic pigeonhole. And for every possible interpretation of this release will be ten others; all of which will likely explain some form personal significance and meaning. In the end, The Finding can be summed as a mysterious shadow of audible beauty that wisps by, leaving nothing but fragments to consume and piece back together. And without relying on any one particular genre, the results are nothing short of astounding. groovemine

When you get past the hype, genrefication, over-saturation, image-consciousness and overall pretension of popular music consumption today, what you get down to is how well the music you’re listening to engages your imagination. Very few records do this, and further, we don’t allow very many records to do this. Ambient and instrumental music has always had the upper hand, here, but those camps can often get carried away with the abstract, with attention to melody or the visceral quality that makes art stand out to newcomers.

Kevin Patzelt, under his pseudonym, Dreissk, has created a work that’s not only visual, imaginatively stimulating and cinematic, but also evolutionary (if a bit shaky). The space and environment on his first record, The Finding, is downright tangible. He takes elements from ambient, sound design, breakbeat, industrial, and even (subtly applied) alternative rock and melds them into a vision that refuses to let you go from the first track. The production is dense, messy, glitchy, and refreshingly imperfect in a digital, broken machine sort of way.

“Dreissk has pulled progressive music in a new direction, and bringing it back to the point: imagination.”

As diverse as Dreissk sounds, The Finding is a story that never loses sight of the plot. The album is crafted into one seamless whole remarkably well, shifting and ebbing into new dynamics like a film unto itself. Beauty trades with ugliness, solace with aggression, and the record comes across as focused without any self-conscious genre nods. This is the best kind of music: a soundtrack for dreams without explaining them to you.

For all this, The Finding is still an initial outing for Dreissk, and he is still finding his comfort zone. The inability of most of the songs to really come to a pounding climax (and sometimes it seems as though they should) reveal an uncertainty to probe those possibly ‘rock’ directions, but it’s a place that would certainly not sound alien in the mix. Regardless of the future, Dreissk’s first album is incredibly solid footing.

Between The Finding and Terminal Sound System’s recent outing, Heavy Weather, it really seems as though there’s a new breed of musicians evolving into the foreground coming from popular music pasts and embracing technology to create fresh and new music with their melodic tastes. While he isn’t pleasing either the avant-garde purists or the electronic dance crowds, Dreissk has pulled progressive music in a new direction, and bringing it back to the point: imagination. textura

Mike Cadoo's n5MD imprint has now been in operation long enough that its first generation of artists has now started inspiring a second, with Kevin Patzelt aka Dreissk a case study. Legend has it that after graduating from college in the San Francisco and Seattle areas where he began DJing and dipping his toes into the electronic music pool, Patzelt was working as a sound designer in the gaming industry when a friend introduced him to n5MD via the label's One Five Zero compilation. That proved to be a watershed moment for Patzelt as it became a catalyst towards the creation of The Finding, his debut full-length under the Dreissk name for, yes, none other than n5MD.

The hour-long collection shows his sound to be a natural fit for the label, as it perpetuates its long-standing commitment to high-intensity ambient-electronica, but it also finds Patzelt doing more than merely replicate existing artistic gestures. One thing's for sure: The Finding is no wallflower. The album turns combustible when rippling shards of synthetic patterns appear on the horizon in “To That Which Binds Me” and then explode in a blaze of beats and atmospheric thunder. The synthesizer patterns in “Depart” pulsate with ever-increasing ferocity until the resonant chime of an electric guitar also joins in, escalating the aggressive pitch of the material even further. “Emergence” builds slowly in a manner befitting its eleven-minute running time, and lays out a solid pulsating foundation before hard-hitting beats enter halfway through to extend the track's epic reach.

One of The Finding's distinguishing characteristics is that it's rarely static; instead, a given setting starts out in one place and then develops dramatically throughout its run, with elements moving in and out of the mix as the mood dictates. There's also a striking contrast between the epic character of the material and the fact that a good portion of it's beatless (the penultimate “Disappearance” a good example)—think of it as a dynamic ambient-shoegaze hybrid that also pulls into its orbit wide-screen soundscaping and cosmic explorations. diskant.dk

Foruroligende støj fra en sælsom krypt Bag det besynderlige navn Dreissk befinder sig amerikaneren Kevin Patzelt, som først de senere år er begyndt at få så meget fast form på sine musikalske kompositioner, at de nu har fundet vej ud til et større publikum via n5MD. Der bliver ikke leflet for det publikumsvenlige og det letfordøjelige i Patzelts blidt støjende ambient, krydret med adskillige lag IDM og indadvendte passager, men musikken skaber uro i sindet på både skæbnesvanger og dragende vis. Skæringerne tager solidt afsæt i en blanding af ambient gaze, insisterende perkussion, indvævede guitarmønstre, der skaber emotionelle resonanser i et sært, lukket rum. Der er masser på færde hos Patzelt, og han er eminent dygtig til at holde paletten sikkert i hånden, så der ikke er nogen af ingredienserne der kammer over og skaber ubalance. Faktisk er der en utrolig helstøbt stemning på albummets ni skæringer, der fletter sig ind i hinanden og udgør et organisk hele, samtidig med at de er præcise punktnedslag i en kunstners kreative proces.

Dreissk vil finde sit publikum blandt lyttere af mere avanceret ambient, der vil langt mere end bare behage og føre hen. Der er derimod en stålskarp kantethed i Patzelts måde at skabe støj og stilhed på. Det er ikke musik til en gyserfilm, men man bliver uvilkårligt foruroliget og vagtsom af at lytte til Dreissk. Det er, som om det hele er lige ved at eksplodere lige op i fjæset på lytteren – uden at det nogensinde tager det sidste afgørende skridt ud i destruktionen.

Bliver man så forløst? Ja, det gør man, for det er også, som om der foregår en renselsesproces, mens man fordyber sig i det elektroniske landskab. En katarsis, hvor tanker, følelser og forudanelser mødes i et mystisk og mytisk rum. the skeleton crew quarterly

The idea of Kevin Patzelt, the man behind dreiskk, being publicized as the first of n5MD’s next-generation artists seemed dangerous to me, not because I’d ever heard the dreissk project before but because artists taking inspiration from label-mates of a previous era sounds akin to a label spinning its wheels. That's hardly the case, thankfully. Having played The Finding through a multitude of times now, I understand n5MD’s angle; Patzelt does tip his hat to a flurry of styles either conceived or impeccably mastered by his predecessors, only he footnotes these influences into an undercurrent beneath dreiskk’s own vision.

The restlessness at the root of The Finding, dreissk’s inability to settle on ambience or loose composition, makes the whole affair that much more satisfying. From ambient tracks that stand sturdily on their own (‘Beholden’) to structured environments that simmer, swell and rise (‘Unknown Discontent’), Patzelt crafts a cantankerous mood-piece of songs that needn’t be separated into skip-able tracks (but it’s a nice gesture nonetheless). Like Tim Hecker, the majority of these songs exist in a state of turmoil, some fighting for beauty, others basking in disorder. The stargazing quality of ‘Depart’ may recall M83 with its achingly lovely guitar floating over menacing and muddled riffs, whereas ‘To That Which Binds Me’ boils over into industrial hysterics, well-crafted enough to avoid sounding obnoxious but too chaotic to communicate much else.

Touching on both the dreamy and nightmarish, dreissk’s achievements remain ultimately technical; the bubbling details of ‘Emergence’ are the song’s highpoint, not the heavy-hitting live drums that hammer the point home. Bombastic moments such as these may keep The Finding from getting groggy but they also steer some stirring music into predictable, epic fanfare. And in repeated cases over this n5MD debut, Patzelt shows he’s better when avoiding that impulse. cyclic defrost

While US-based producer Kevin Patzelt first started Djing and making electronic music back in 1997 while at college, in the intervening years he’s been occupied as a sound designer in the gaming industry. Thus, this debut album as Dreissk ‘The Finding’ represents Patzelt’s first musical release, its contents apparently initially inspired by Patzelt’s discovery of the n5MD label through a friend, a cultural feedback loop if ever there was one. There’s certainly a ‘typically n5MD’ feel to the nine tracks collected here, with the enveloping fusion of sweeping electronic ambience and treated post-rock elements particularly calling to mind the likes of label mainstay SubtractiveLAD. It’s also an album that compared to other recent n5MD releases sees Patzelt making far more use of guitar as an instrumental elements, whether used to generate ambient / shoegaze textures or extensively treated with effects.

Opening track ‘Beholden’ smoothly introduces the immersive aesthetic at work here, easing the listener into proceedings with a slow bleed of delicate piano notes and trailing, dreamlike drone textures that sees brittle-sounding melodic electronics slowly creeping into the very edges of the mix as the swelling backdrop of drones ascends into a buzzing wall of insect-like textures. Elsewhere, ‘To That Which Binds Me’ takes things out into bleaker territory, shifting from an ambient wash of distant scraping fretboard textures and ominous drones into a rush of crunching distorted breakbeat rhythms and blurred melodic drones, in what’s easily this collection’s most highly charged offering, before ‘Unknown Discontent’ sees a sparse, echoing drum pulse and murmuring bass notes making its way beneath a spacious backdrop of dubbed-out percussion textures and swelling cinematic drones, before industrial snares arrive to take things off amidst trailing shoegaze guitar textures, and yawning pitched down instrumental tones. An impressive and immersive debut album from Patzelt as Dreissk that’s likely to particularly appeal to fans of labelmate SubtractiveLAD’s epic post-rock / IDM explorations. Alien

Debut album of Kevin Patzelt is the right thing for my ears! Pleasant ambient, minimalist space is accompanied by a constantly changing accompaniment, thus, each piece its original, atmospheric with specific sound. Every sample that Patzelt is using, is keeped cool and slowly connecting another element. A pleasant surprise (for me personally a big plus) is a very decent job with the guitar, which is not squeezed forcefully with deadly distortion, its comfortable included in the audio background. It may seem that when someone will say about this album, so you would think that it is an alloy of sounds. The truth is that even if every song is different (from post-rock influences the pulsing electronics), they are going behind, powered by a beautiful complement each other. The overall result is a great sound mastering, I recommend you drop the album through headphones so that you have the right experience. I hope that once we get a concert appearance. I think we would forget. I have nothing to say, since last Displacer I have not received anything like this album. Full count, fully recommend.

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