Ay - Kong Doom [self release - 2007]This nice little 3" mini album is the brainchild of Adrian Bertolone who produces his music under the enigmatic name "Ay". Inside this album you will find ten tracks that together last for just a little over sixteen minutes. Some parts of this album last less than sixty seconds while the longest track span for well over three minutes. Within these brief attacks, Bertolone smashes together samples, distorted beats and broken rhythms, resulting in an ill combination of IDM, Breakcore and noise. "King Doom" opens the album with a chaotic clash of broken samples and electronic beats. After a minute of this you get the claustrophobic feeling that Bertolone is wildly changing radio stations and if that's not bad enough, all of the radio stations he skips through are playing sounds of broken computer games. Mayhem is the name of the game. However, after a while you learn to recognize a certain patterns behind these insane sounding attacks. On the third track, "Bye Street", distorted percussion sounds are replaced by an almost trance-like musical moment, which fades away as quickly as it came to being, as low mechanical sounds replace it. Ay throws a lot of elements together in his tracks, but maybe it would be to the benefit of the artist if he gave time for each element instead of just letting it dissolve into the next chapter. The last track – "Miike Track" is a great closure for this album, it’s a long, subtle drone of rather soothing sounds. If we were mercilessly bombarded with broken sounds for the last nine tracks, Bertolone is now showing us another, wholly different sonic side. Overall, this album is pretty good, with lots of good moments and good ideas. In my opinion, it would do these ten tracks wonders if they where twice as long as they are now.
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