TRJJ

LOW COMPANY words:
Knockout! Thrillingly arid, exploratory rhythm trips on a way more austere, isolationist tip than anything we’ve heard from Trjj/Trii/Trj/Tri previously. Sounds like Liima re-scoring Dead Man or some shit! The music was made for a student film that was in development for four years before being aborted when the directors realised they lacked either the chops or the budget or both to realise their vision. There were three substantially different scripts, but the basic setting stayed the same: “a potential future in which humans have become extinct, leaving most of the planet a desert land.” Sounds like 2021! Who needs actual footage when TRj is so adept at conjuring images of a parched landscape devoid of human life or hope or joy. Shimmering, shape-shifting micro-melodies seem to emerge mirage-like from the metallic and bowled percussion’s blurred overtones, though there are a handful of more fleshed-out pieces: stiff-backed organ-fuelled stepper ‘Animal Gathering’ comes over like Alex Reece by way of Werkbund (!), and 'Second Abandoned Highway' is disarmingly pretty cyborg-gamelan-pop, replete with lugubrious lost-boy vox. But it’s the bleak, monotone drum-spells like ‘Prospector Left’ and 'Tzama as Animal' that prove most rewarding: this is the kinda flinty, organic broken techno / dessicated downer dancehall that me most feverish dreams are made of - listening to 'em for the first time feels, strangely, like a sort of homecoming. 10 out of 10!