[reviews] afe121cd
meerkat: kapnos

Dark ambient texture-works may be had from Meerkat, whose "Kapnos" is the third in a line of recent releases by the team of Maurizio Bianchi and Matteo Uggeri / Hue. One of them was about clouds, another was about a desert.

Fans of Bianchi who prefer his altruistic and wispier side to the early cassette noise-releases of the 1980s may or may not be interested in investigating this release, although Bianchi himself doesn't actually appear on it; Meerkat are in fact ten Italians who claim they like to operate under a "cryptic name", and to prove it they provide three pages of biographies and a detailed discography by way of a press release.

On "Kapnos", they play in various duo and trio pairings, and the results are very polished combinations of field recordings with highly treated electronic music, creating slow-moving but strangely immersive environments.

[Ed Pinsent]