"Uniflex Gaba Crux" by Sebastian Maria is the reversed & inversed dream of a collected club night mosaic where the brain processes the lucid gunk of groove immemorial.  The fabric of the mix is an unwound audio intarsia where colors of genre smatter & spatter in an abstract expressionist manner, like cotton candy, the tantrums of an aphasic droid, the electronic music landscape of the last 30 years as a watercolor being washed out & dripped down the drain. I consider it a veritable suite through touches & smears of jazz, jungle, drum & bass, chillout, acid, trap, dub & minimal techno, ambient, rave, noise, power electronics, industrial, trance, & of course, gabber. It reminds me of all the power & wanderlust of I:Cube’s 2012 “M: Megamix” in half the time, deliciously tripped out. 

See if you can spot the following: A seagull becomes a trumpet, a clap gurgles for dear life at the bottom of the mix, a DJ shouts provocations into the void, an amen break tumbles down a hill as a ball of steel wool, & a young Michael Jackson & Diana Ross, long time friends, are reunited by an acapella rapport, almost algorithmically & those are just selected happenings from Side A of this Crude Tapes release. Seamlessly, it flows into its dovetail counterpart Side B. 

An 808 becomes a Timex, bass becomes a heart’s arrythmia, the indigenous ancestor of Future Sound of London’s “Papua New Guinea” makes an appearance via the comedown of an ayahuasca trip, a pick-up truck fails to start amidst a lush reverberating of a forest, & a sample of the Notorious B.I.G. becomes tile-work tessellated in the tunnel of a k-hole. Gabber, slang for friend in the UK, is you, listener, who is vicariously experiencing a pal’s consciousness warping. All this & more persist along the ~30 minutes. That is just scratching the surface of all the elemental happenings embedded in “Crux’s” runtime. You would have to hear it yourself to get the essential experience. 

The Cuban neo-baroque writer Jose Lezama Lima, in his essay “Coronation of Formlessness,” ponders a quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “That which is most elevated, most excellent, in man is formless & one must avoid configuring it in anyway other than a noble feat.” Lezama Lima, in response, says that “Quality in man comes to us from whatever sacrificial dose of mystery and formlessness he can endure…Form can no longer be defined as the final stage of matter, but rather as the most efficacious instant for movement to be grasp without being halted.” This is a project with no skips, no pause. It is fleeting as it is vertiginous as it is addictive. It is pure flow, where the goal of astounding the listener consistently with new corroded frontiers of sound transcended from the ossified remains of category is achieved easily. 

Go into the dark of this release by Maria, wet, dripping, cold, don’t be scared, & see all the new colors that it offers.

-  Aristilde Kirby 2021

CRT-010

Sebastian Maria - Uniflex Gaba Crux - CRT-010

B8 divisadora

B7 askratch

B6 grovel

B5 youth prayer

B4 earth transition

B3 such things

B2 blue shallows bounce

B1 young dumb arrogant

A6 dancer's lament

A5 Speaking Thru Worlds

A4 siente el impacto

A3 melrose bop

A2 open window aurora

A1 breaths for goldy

c r u d e t a p e s
at a glacial pace since 2011 / not for profit label

crudetapes@gmail.com 

crude mix series featuring artists, musicians, dancers, poets, and other "non-djs"

also editions refined for cd based releases