Kcin & Tilman Robinson: Requiem For The Holocene

- They say that you enjoy the music that matches your mood. Presumably that means, for the last couple of years, the collective ears of the world have been listening to some pretty messed up stuff. I know that one of my favourite records of 2021 was Kcin’s Decade Zero. A pointed and extremely loud, ambient-industrial opus which came along to tap us on the shoulder, or perhaps deliver a punch to the face - with this timely reminder: you might be strung out by pandemic panic, heck, COVID might even kill you, but if you do get through this, climate change is coming and it’s going to make the plague look like a picnic.

It’s a message that’s worth repeating and come 2022, honestly? I don’t feel like I’ve bounced back very much from the last two years. I’d say, the way things look, I’m more than happy to kick back and listen to some thunderous jams about how we’re all screwed. How pleasant then to be greeted by the strains of a Requiem For The Holocene. Where last year’s efforts were a full-throated call to arms in a last-ditch effort to stave off the effects of anthropogenic climate change, we appear to have clicked over into a later stage of grief: wallowing in the sadness that accompanies the decline and death of the current geological epoch, the Holocene.

Because misery loves company Kcin -who is actually Nick Meredith, a drummer in his daytime gig- has teamed up with fellow experimentalist Tilman Robinson in bemoaning the trashing of the planet. Actually, these like-minded artists were both already marching, independent of each other, in that same funeral procession before they got here. I’ve already spoken about Kcin’s Decade Zero, but if you need more chilling horror in your aural day, then Robinson’s 2020 album, CULTURECIDE is, explicitly “an investigation of the anthropocene; a seven part lamentation for our chaotic world.”

Thematically Kcin and Robinson are clearly very close co-travellers but sonically, though they share a passion for a certain kind of darkly experimental sound, the individual ingredients they bring make a contrasting blend that is unexpectedly fruitful. Where Meredith likes to distort his recorded percussion via endless trips through the studio, creating, in the end, really messed up sounding instrumental dark ambient and industrial, Tilman -what I’ve heard of his work- comes from a chamber-music background and plays piano of that so-called neoclassical kind. He also likes to hit the synthesiser every now and then, in a way that sometimes sounds a lot like synthwave.

Requiem’s epic opener, Go Be Free Then, features elements that are recognisably trademarks of both artists: shredded, distorted, synthetic sound, soon joined by scalic, arpeggiated synthesiser - the very hallmark of synthwave. The sound meanders through the dubby echoes of a wasteland that is nonetheless oddly beautiful, as treble synth lines sparkle in the cold and dead atmosphere of the soundscape.

The titular Requiem For The Holocene is not actually the conflagration you might have imagined, no dies irae, but a piano vignette, treated to some gently sepia-tone production; it’s quite moving. The lesson so far appears to be that our demise will be quietly beautiful. Well, some of it.Your Tomorrow Has No Tomorrow is the sucker-punch after the silence and is anything but pretty, blaring a distorted alarm with all the subtlety of a grating dubstep anthem. It is quite effective: the ear boxing wake-up call after fifteen minutes spent sliding, quietly into extinction. The synth maximalism shines and roars like a firestorm that recalls Blanck Mass, an artist I’m often reminded of when I listen to Kcin. The hard burn exhausts its fuel, petering out into skeletal synthwave and ambient. We aren’t done, however, the cheekily titled Skull Emoji builds steam into a wrecking ball of jumbled rhythms and sounds that, somehow, manage to be quite harmonically satisfying, in a last burst of energy before the human race collapses in a heap.

I don’t know how you plan to spend the last years on the planet before the sun scorches most life into ash, but if the thought sends your mind into a few paroxysms of horror, then this record may make an appropriate soundtrack to your laboured breathing. It’s clear how Kcin & Tilman Robinson feel from this music that is by turns eerily, sadly beautiful and raging. It bespeaks the impotence artists and musicians often feel in the face of the world’s very real problems. In the last instance, whatever else they may be able to do, they can strike a chord with the devastating emotions of our experience.

- Chris Cobcroft.