Gantz - Songs About Arson
The fringes of bass music have always been exciting and out there, but Gantz stands apart as genuinely leftfield. They started their career in dubstep, creating 140bpm music so far removed from their contemporaries it was hard to even refer to their beats under the same umbrella term. As time passed, we saw notable releases from Gantz on the following labels: Innamind Recordings, System Music, and the prestigious DEEP MEDi MUSIK. Each release from Gantz shocked the community, featuring wild sound design, brutal bass weight and a production style like no other.
Gantz’s musical sensibilities have continued to evolve from the conventions of bass music and dubstep, slipping into avant-garde, abstract and sound art. The 2022 self-released EP, Songs About Arson, grips the wheel with both hands and steers unobstructed in this new direction. With a total runtime of roughly 6 minutes, Songs About Arson is short, with each song attempting to carve out a unique sonic charm within that restrictive timeframe.
Gantz uses chaotic strings and tonal experiments throughout. The first track, ‘She Watches’, uses what sounds like sampled guitar put through a woodchipper, glued together again but marked with all the snags and splinters that come with it. Its frenzied construction, or rather deconstruction, creates an overwhelming weight that discombobulates and rattles away. ‘Always There’ relies on a vintage piano melody that is brutally filtered, a filter which opens up halfway through the track creating a more aggressive sound that fizzes left and right.
Dubstep Era Gantz Soundcloud Profile Picture
A similar melodic is used in ‘A Deadly Caress’, which leads me to think that samples may come from the same source, and Gantz is attempting to flip a sample in multiple ways. The mangled remnants of a bass guitar can be heard in the track ‘An Arsonist.’ The bass is plucked with malice on this track and sounds relentlessness, with all the feedback from distortion blaring over it. The final track on the EP ‘Burn With Me’ stands out as something special. Decidedly the most abstract and atmospheric on the EP, ‘Burn With Me’ combines a brittle textural soundscape with off-kilter percussive clicks and a subdued piano line that rounds off the short but sweet EP beautifully.
Tracklist:
She Watches
Always There
A Deadly Caress
An Arsonist
Burn With Me
Label: Gantz Self-Release (2022)
Gantz - Songs About Arson
