Kcin: Decade Zero | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- As we approach the disease-free dawn at the end of the global pandemic, how does it make you feel to know that we’re all still doomed? Did a year locked in your room make you forget about the drifting clouds of ash, the drying rivers, the cyclonic destruction, the global extinction and all the other harbingers of environmental catastrophe? Kcin has neither forgotten nor come unprepared. This is the moment of truth, the point of refusal, the chance to shrug off our collective powerlessness and, instead, rage against the corporate greed and the culture-war zombies. This is Decade Zero, the time and the sound of one supreme effort to reject our collective demise.

Most of us don’t have great opportunities in what we do for a living, to stop and say, “hey, this is all well and good, but shouldn’t we focus on climate change?” Nicholas Meredith, a jazz drummer by training and session / tour muso for the likes of Gordi, E^ST and many others is probably no different. That is why, when he retires to his home studio, he thrashes out dark and thunderous beats, smashing out his burning frustration at humanity’s ineptitude in the face of a world that’s (literally) on fire.

His anger is not without nuance, just look at the sweetly scintillating piano that introduces this manifesto of a record that is Decade Zero, a recording of his friend Chris Long, rolling out of opener Blood On The Water. It’s a little difficult to define what Kcin does in terms of genre, but beats it does have, often moving relentlessly like a heart that’s racing, gripped by anxiety. Distance From The Sea Of Sorrow will give you those, paired with the whispers of Elizabeth Fader, who sounds far removed indeed from her usual lush indie gig; it’s more like the accusatory rasp of a banshee as she hisses “Can you see what you have done to me?”

Meredith doesn’t like to call what Kcin does techno, but it’s probably the closest fit. His multi-layered often maximalist roaring has co-travellers in a technohead like Jon Hopkins. You can hear the similar breadth of palette as dub, downtempo and ambient soundscapes rub shoulders with the bookending, bombastic beats on a track like Salt Ghost. However, perhaps his nearest echo, decibel for decibel, is in Benjamin John Power’s outrageously loud and furious Blanck Mass. I was particularly struck by the kindred quality of their sounds during the volcanic distortion of late album cut A Wave Goodbye. Actually, Power even delivered his own environmental cris-de-coeur on 2017’s World Eater. Anyway, you really can't overemphasise the volume of noise here: for all the quiet in the eye of Kcin’s storm as on a piece like Global South, never forget that the kind of punishment that would make Ben Frost or Kevin Martin proud, is just around the corner.

In a way that may well do justice to the emotional intensity of Decade Zero, Nicholas Meredith’s process of creation has been thorough, verging on the obsessional. In a cyclical manner he took samples of his collaborators (like Tangents’ Adrian Klumpes whose keyboard work is apparently all over this record) and his own live drumming and reworked them in his home studio. Those results were taken to a larger studio and with producer Jack Prest they were worked into a new ‘live’ performance, to achieve a more cohesive, naturalistic sound. If you thought that might be enough, Meredith disagreed and reworked those results, again, into the final synthetic creation you hear here.

Haunting, savage, breathless, brutal, Decade Zero is the thoroughly realised document of Nicholas Meredith’s despair and rage. However content the human race might be to slip softly into the night, in the face of this impotence Kcin has unleashed a mighty roar.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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