Beijing-based duo Zaliva-D returns with a second installment on Knekelhuis. After last year’s great EP, released on Shanghai label SVBKVLT, Zaliva-D unleashes a new record in these unreal pandemic times. At its core is a concept of data’s capacity to overcome any boundary, whether that’s physical, digital or mental.
The material at hand, created after the second European tour, pushes heavily through walls, with bombastically accentuated kicks. Blended with joyous, psychedelic songwriting, it is a testament to the power of music to unite despite involuntary confinement.
Artwork by Fenna Fiction. Mastering by Brandenburg.
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Review
Zaliva-D sounds like the protoclone of a hyper-real hemp plant, but does Chinese industrial somewhere between blast furnace, cyberpunk and social credit system. The irons are glowing, the kicks are snapping, voices are grunting like pigs in front of the bolt gun. Click, clack – with every thump that gets lost in the cerebral convolutions, you want to imagine Li Chao hopping around the campfire in Rumpelstiltskin fashion, gnawing on fortune cookies while giggling softly and stretching out his hands like two worn-out rubber bands. Sounds crazy – it is too. “Immorality” is music from the future that we’ve heard of but can’t place, because it brings together everything you didn’t want to throw together – and yet results in temporary temperature changes in the lumbar region. For some, this may be painting-by-numbers music, for others Zaliva-D is the personified simulation of a style that imagines itself without reference to likes and love and, as a counter-offer, the worst double-whopper beats with a penchant for Dada fetishism pushes over. If the record doesn’t come with cozy lounge crap, play it loud, play it louder, let the subwoofer breathe! Hail to Zaliva-D, hail to Knekelhuis!
HHV