Kris Baha - Breathe
Oh boy, people hate it when you change genre. Music fans are fickle creatures, and often, you won't find fans fickler than underground electronic lovers, especially when considering record-diving, discos delving and all other ways to get your social credit up. Most people like artists boxed into neat little genres, but Kris Baha has other ideas. The Australian-Italian-Armenian talent further drove away from the word genre in favour of something more aesthetically rich. Baha's latest Breathe EP is him finally coming of age and embracing the punky cybernetic goth that's always laid dormant within him.
For a little context, Kris Baha started under labels such as Pinkman and Cocktail d'Amore Music, releasing fresh, slow-burning EBM-infused techno that put Baha on the map. He routinely flexed his chuggy production style laced with distorted vocals. Fast forward to 2023, and you'll notice that the vocals have persisted but have slowly crept up in BPM as Kris introduced more great industrial beats and trance elements into his sound. Take, for example, his fantastic 2023 album Ghosts the Machine under a new alias of the same name or, more recently, Cyber Body Music Vol.1 (2024). Both are new but old, encapsulating that same aesthetic in vastly different packages, bringing me to his latest release, Breathe.
Breathe again brings a hyper-bombastic sensibility to Baha's production. This latest EP blasts the doors off with about 10 tonnes of Semtex. The production is raw but polished, and the 4x4 beats blast over the speakers. What Baha does so well is making these four tracks aggressively sweet to the point of overindulgence, and the crazy thing is that it's impossible to stop. It's pure diabolical excess. The crispy 90s cyber-goth runs riot with shades of the action-ready Matrix hardcore, Blade blood-soaked rave and Ultraviolet's pearlescent trance everywhere you turn.
Kris Baha balances the abrasive hyper-pastiche of the 1990s and early 2000s and the cutesier fun that came around the same time. While Kris Baha is breathing new life into his music, he's not reinventing the wheel–he has come pretty close to perfecting it. Well, it's not the most profound music you'll come across. It's an unabashedly knows precisely what it is, when it's for and, ultimately, who is for it, which is the EP's most striking characteristic.
Tracklist:
mescalin dreams
breathe
grains of time
bite me
Label: Power Station (2024)
Kris Baha - Breathe
