Posted in Whathaveyou on February 27th, 2026 by JJ Koczan
I consider myself exceedingly fortunate to have been able to see Kombynat Robotron at Freak Valley Festival (review here) last June, so a live album recorded about a month before I had that pleasure is an enticing prospect. Live at Fuzz Club Festival 2025 will be out April 17, indeed through Fuzz Club Records which also released the Kiel, Germany, trio’s first song-based (as opposed to jam-based, although the songs were jam-based; you know what I’m just gonna keep going) LP, the stellar-and-I-do-mean-that-in-the-burning-plasma-sense AANK (review here). Hearing the live version of “Staub” streaming at the bottom of the post only reaffirms the excitement.
The following came from the PR wire, but only because I signed up for their Bandcamp email list. You might consider giving a follow, if that’s your thing.
Dig it:
KOMBYNAT ROBOTRON – Live At Fuzz Club Festival ’25 – April 17
Kombynat Robotron’s set at the 2025 Fuzz Club Festival is being immortalised on wax with this super-limited live album release. The Kiel, Germany-based trio delivered a late-night assault of feedback-blasted kraut-punk and expansive psychedelic space-rock. Kombynat Robotron’s appearance at the festival landed just ahead of the release of their 2025 studio album and Fuzz Club debut ‘AANK’ and was the first glimpse of what was in store, pulling heavily from ‘AANK’ album tracks (‘Ikarus’, Staub’, ‘Sauerstoff’, ‘Finsternis’, ‘Schnee’) plus two cuts from their 2024 ‘West Mata’ LP (‘Jason II’, ‘Vasa’)
The resulting ‘Live At Fuzz Club Festival 2025’ album was recorded straight from the sound desk and mixed and mastered for this release by Bob De Wit, with artwork by Olya Dyer incorporating Innerstrings and Dwavehed’s stage visuals. The vinyl release is limited to /250 hand-numbered copies.
Tracklisting: 1. Ikarus 2. Staub 3. Vasa 4. Jason II 5. Sauerstoff 6. Schnee 7. Finsternis
KOMBYNAT ROBOTRON – OHNE LICHT – Tour April 2026 15.04. – DE – Jena, KuBa 16.04. – CH – Basel, Quarterdeck 17.04. – FR – Marseille, L’Intermédiaire 19.04. – FR – Arthez de Bearn, Le Pingouin Alternatif 22.04. – FR – Rouen, Le 3 Pièces 23.04. – FR – Paris, Le Chinois 25.04. – BE – Diest, Trekstaal 28.04. – DE – Leipzig, Moritzbastei 29.04. – DE – Berlin, Neue Zukunft 30.04. – DE – Hamburg, Elbdeich Studio 01.05. – DE – Lübeck, Maifest 02.05. – NL – Eindhoven, FuzzClub Festival presented by pøjpøj and FUZZ CLUB RECORDS!
Posted in Whathaveyou on January 29th, 2026 by JJ Koczan
German space noisemakers Kombynat Robotron will take to the road in April as they continue to support their 2025 album, AANK (review here), that saw them streamline their songwriting process for their most direct batch of material to-date. The festival around which they’re building the run — and increasingly this is how independent tours happen; around festivals, or at least one as is the case here — is that of their label, Fuzz Club Records which will be held at The Effenaar in Eindhoven, which at least the last time I was there was a rad spot indeed.
So much the better for Kombynat Robotron, with according radness. I was lucky enough to see the trio at last year’s Freak Valley Festival (review here) in Germany, and that was a blast even before I’d dug into the record for review. If they’re not coming where you are now, keep an eye out, as the band were also in the first batch of confirmations for Keep it Low in Munich this coming October. I wouldn’t in the slightest be surprised if another tour was in the works for that time. New album? Well, with a band so unpredictable I wouldn’t hazard a guess, but maybe.
If you make it out, enjoy:
KOMBYNAT ROBOTRON – OHNE LICHT – Tour April 2026!
15.04. – DE – Jena, KuBa 16.04. – CH – Basel, Quarterdeck 17.04. – FR – Marseille, L’Intermédiaire 19.04. – FR – Arthez de Bearn, Le Pingouin Alternatif 22.04. – FR – Rouen, Le 3 Pièces 23.04. – FR – Paris, Le Chinois 25.04. – BE – Diest, Trekstaal 28.04. – DE – Leipzig, Moritzbastei 29.04. – DE – Berlin, Neue Zukunft 30.04. – DE – Hamburg, Elbdeich Studio 01.05. – DE – Lübeck, Maifest 02.05. – NL – Eindhoven, FuzzClub Festival
Posted in Reviews on October 3rd, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Sneaking it in on a Friday? What is this madness? Fair question. The wretched truth is that in slating this Quarterly Review — welcome, by the way — I ran into a scheduling conflict with a stream I booked for Oct. 14. I wasn’t sure how to resolve the logistics there, and 10 reviews plus a full-album stream is more than I have brainpower to write in a day, even if I do nothing else, so think of this as like the soft-launch grand opening of the Fall 2025 Quarterly Review. I’ll go all through next week and then wrap up on Monday the 15th. 70 total releases covered, 10 per day, during that time.
It’s gonna be a lot, and I’m sure as always happens there will be other things I’ll fall behind on, but to be perfectly honest with you, I could really, really stand to force myself to sit down and engage the hardcore escapism of getting lost in 70 records one after the next, so I think I might actually enjoy this this time through. Famous last words, but last time was one of my favorite QRs ever, so I’ve got momentum on my side. I’ll keep you posted as we go, and while I’m here, have a great weekend. We’ll pick up with more on Monday.
Quarterly Review #1-10:
Faetooth, Labyrinthine
While being terrible for most everything else, 2025 is a good year to go dark. Faetooth do so — darker, anyhow — with their sophomore album, Labyrinthine, and find a place where doomgaze and sludgier, scream-topped distortion can meet without seeming any more incongruous than the Los Angeles trio want it them to be. The record runs a substantial 10 songs/55 minutes, and songs like “Iron Gate,” “Hole,” “White Noise,” and “Eviscerate” derive as much of their atmosphere from the band scorching the ground beneath them as from the more subdued, murky and melodic stretches. With these elements put together in a cohesive whole sound, Labyrinthine is less an aesthetic revolution than a (welcome) generational refresh to doom and sludge, with the band set on a path of progression toward an increasingly individualized stylistic take. Idiot dudes will talk shit because they’re women. Don’t listen to idiot dudes. Listen to riffs. Faetooth have plenty to get you started.
The mighty Kiel, Germany, trio — oops, they just became a four-piece; heads up — recorded Bring Your Lungs this past April while on their first-ever tour of Australia. It’s a three-song, about-35-minute live-in-studio collection, and they’ll reportedly press it to vinyl in no small part so they have copies to take with them when they return down under in 2027. I guess it went well. Bring Your Lungs leaves little question as to why as the band put themselves in line among the heaviest sons of Sleep in the suitably-half-formed oeuvre of bong metal. Even the shortest of the three, the middle cut “Wax” (7:38) lays tonal waste(d), while “Fathead” (11:17) and “Goddamn High” (15:59) bark and crush and caveman plod, hitting into a slowdown and a speedup, respectively, that convey both the plan underlying the mire and the willfully, gleefully insurmountable nature of that mire itself. They’d like to teach the world to stone. Can’t help but think it’d be better for it.
We may not have circa-2005 Genghis Tron to manifest the in-brain chaos of modern overwhelm, but Jon Weisnewski (Sandrider, Akimbo) stands ready with the extremist shenanigans industrial grind of Nuclear Dudes to pick up the slack. Following the punishing radness of 2023’s Boss Blades (review here), Weisnewski, his keyboards, a buttload of samples and guitar here collaborate with vocalist Brandon Nakamura to manifest a cacophonous stew that almost gets away with tapping into “Welcome to the Jungle” on album opener “Napalm Life” (get it?) by making it almost completely unrecognizable. Further punishment is dealt with semiautomatic fervor on “Concussion Protocol” and “Juggalos for Congress,” but the 11-track/23-minute entirety of Nuclear Dudes‘ second full-length comes across like an intentional brainema, so approach with caution and know that, if it feels right, you’re not alone.
A quick glance at the social media for Italian stoner-droner heretofore solo-project Void Sinker, and one finds that sole denizen Guglielmo Allegro is currently searching for a bassist and a drummer to fill out the lineup. Unquestionably this would be a significant change to the proceedings on the five-song/69-minute Echoes From the Deep, which plunges frontal-lobe-first into undulating waveforms and its own distorted expanse. A clear progression of notes can be heard later in closer “Andromeda” (16:21) and “Hollow” is minimalist to the point of being barely there for most of its nine minutes, but obviously a certain kind of meditative monolith is constructed from lead cut “Cetus” onward. There are no shallow dives here, and one can’t help but wonder what Allegro might have in mind for filling out these arrangements with a rhythm section. Will Void Sinker adopt more straightforward stoner-doom riffing, or is the intention to try to make this kind of drone actually convey a sense of movement? Your guess is as good as mine, but for now, the trance induced is noteworthy.
Raw oldschool doom with a punker edge permeates Hebi Katana‘s first album for Ripple Music and fourth overall, Imperfection. And the title becomes somewhat ironic, because while the implication is they’re talking about a warts-‘n’-all sound perhaps in reference to the production rawness of the seven-track/35-minute outing highlighted by cuts like “Dead Horse Requiem” and “Blood Spirit Rising,” which shuffle-pushes into and out of a pastoral midsection, as well as the finale “Yume wa Kareno,” it just about perfectly suits the material itself, and the band bring vigor to the deceptively catchy “Praise the Shadows” that, while dark in atmosphere, speaks to a dynamic that’s developed in their sound over time. That is to say, they might be a ‘new band’ to listeners outside the band’s native Japan, but Imperfection conveys their experience in craft and in its chemistry. If it wasn’t recorded live, close enough. They’re not reshaping genre, but there is perspective at work, to be sure.
That Fair and Warlike Form/Return to Dust, a two-songer full-length with each consuming about 23 minutes of a vinyl side, sure feels like a landmark, but that seems to happen when Melbourne trio Khan are involved. Here they set a sprawl matched by few in heavy progressive psychedelia as the three-piece of Josh Bills (vocals, guitar, keyboard, recording, mixing, mastering), Will Homan (bass) and Beau Heffernan (drums) enact a linear build across the massive soundscape of “That Fair and Warlike Form,” as sure in their purpose as they are defiant of the expectation that these extended pieces might just be jams. Rather, that opener and “Return to Dust” are structured pieces, and resonate emotionally as well as immerse the listener in their clear-eyed breadth. “Return to Dust” is a level of triumph not every act achieves, and “That Fair and Warlike Form” is no less impactful throughout its procession. One of the best of 2025, but less about the fleeting moment than providing a place to dwell long-term. That is to say, it’s a record that has the potential for its own cult, never mind the wider following amassed by the band.
The first Sarkh LP, Helios (review here), arrived through Worst Bassist Records in 2023 and was a purposeful adventure across genre lines, taking elements of post-rock, heavy riffing, and even aspects of black metal and more extreme ideas into a context that became its own. The shimmer at the outset of “Helios” that starts their second full-length, Heretical Bastard, speaks immediately of communion, and as the German instrumentalists have set about refining and coalescing their sound, ambience remains central to what they do regardless of how outwardly heavy a given part gets, which, in tracks like “Kanagawa” and “Glazial,” is pretty gosh darn heavy, never mind the chug that pays off “Zyklon” or the wash that culminates 11-minute capper “Cape Wrath,” though admittedly, the latter is more about push that heft. It’s movement either way, and Heretical Bastard‘s greatest heresy might just be how convincingly invisible it makes the (yes, imaginary) lines that divide one style from another. A band on their own path, forging their own sound. If you can’t respect that, it’s your loss.
Eight years on from their well-received 2017 debut, Take Me to the Gallows, Chicagoan classic doom metallers Professor Emeritus reach pointedly into the epic with A Land Long Gone, their second record. The band’s traditionalism of form means there’s something inherently familiar about the proceedings, and certainly they’re not the only ones with an affinity for ’80s metal of various stripes these days, but in addition to being distinguished by the forward-mixed vocals of Esteban Julian Pena, the sheer weight of “Pragmatic Occlusion” and “Defeater” and the crescendo of “Kalopsia Caves” sets well alongside the graceful flow of “Zosimos” or the later, partly-acoustic “Hubris,” portraying the dynamic and sense of character brought into the material. Like Philly’s Crypt Sermon, they’re not pretending the intervening decades didn’t happen — you wouldn’t call A Land Long Gone retro, I mean — but their collective heart clearly bleeds for the classics just the same; Trouble, Candlemass, Iron Maiden. If that’s your speed, their blend of chug and soar should hit just right.
Florist know what they’re here for, and as they push through the let’s-start-with-the-universe’s-frequency “432Hz” into the modern, cavernous, riffage and nod of “Another Moon,” my brain sings a hearty fuck yes. They pack 29 minutes of rad into Adrift, their sophomore, six-songer LP, and while they’re not shy about lumber in “Grow” and the closer “Adrift (Part B),” that’s only one end of a style that’s able to move with marked fluidity across a range of tempos that, with a vibrant production, fullness of tone and hard-hit drums shoving it all, make for a refreshing take on what are unrepentantly familiar ideas. That is to say, there’s no pretense in Florist. Volume worship, riff worship, whatever you want to call it, it matters so little when the band are bashing away at “Out of Space” and hell’s bells it’s actually fun. Like, real life fun. The kind you might have with friends in a crowded room with the band on stage killing it through a set likewise heavy and intense but unashamed of the good time it’s having. Also giving, as one might a gift.
Ohio’s Paul Williams has released three ‘audio travelogues’ of the Blue Ridge Highway, with the Moog-only Under Blue Ridge Skies preceded directly by A Blue Ridge Spaceway and Our Grandfather the Mountain earlier this year. Maybe you have, and if so, that’s awesome, but to my knowledge I’ve never been on the Blue Ridge Highway, so I can’t necessarily speak to how the droney “Ghost Over a Pointed Top” or the kraut-style blips and bloops of “See Mount Mitchell” correlate to the experience of driving it. I’ll soak my ignorance in the keyboardy melancholia of “A Carolina Elegy,” which closes with evocations of past storms and forebodes of those still to come. Likewise, I’m not sure what the title “Abbott’s Fantasia” is a reference to, if anything at all, but you don’t get much more dug in than entire compositions played out on various layered, hyper-specific, probably-vintage-and-expensive-to-repair synthesizers, and it’s a kind of nerdery for which I’m very much on board.
Whatever your angle of approach, the story of AANK is the songs. Because there are songs. Eight of them, in fact, on the seventh Kombynat Robotron record in seven years, running 41 minutes long. AANK is the band’s label debut on Fuzz Club Records, and with it, the Kiel, Germany, three-piece of guitarist Jannes Ihnen, bassist Claas Ogorek and drummer Thomas Handschick don’t necessarily reinvent cosmic rock as a genre, but for sure they revamp their take thereupon. To wit, the album they released in Dec. 2024, West Mata (review here), was comprised of three songs running between 11 and 21 minutes long, and worked from an entirely jammier foundation. The songs on AANK, whether blending dream and shove on “Morast” early on or having a crash-happy echoing blowout in “Sauerstoff” later on before capping with the solidified neospace shuffle of “Finsternis,” vocalized or instrumental, keep roughly between three and six minutes each, and have more defined structures.
Kombynat Robotron are by no means the first band to graduate from all-out jamming to a more refined writing style as part of their progression. This past Spring saw Amsterdam’s Temple Fang shift in a not dissimilar fashion toward verse/chorus patterning, albeit still longform, and Greece’s Naxatras have continued to evolve as they’ve found an otherworldly prog on the other side of their years of improv. One might consider since-modernized, once-retroist acts like Graveyard or Kadavar as well (not as a sonic comparison), though I don’t think Ihnen, Ogorek and Handschick are entirely done harnessing a jammy spirit in their material — not the least because that happens all across AANK — but in this collection, it is a drastic enough change from the band’s own prior-established norms that it almost feels like a second debut, though I’ll acknowledge feeling somewhat silly noting that about a band with a seven LP-strong discography. Nonetheless, the freshness of Kombynat Robotron‘s approach to this material resonates in the listening experience. It is new and it sounds new. It sounds like it’s new to them too, and the range and discovery that a short time ago were about what was coming after the next measure, part, etc., has changed to what can be found on the other end of a crafting process and what kinds of evocations can occur there.
And that is wherein the excitement lies, because Kombynat Robotron unfurl their own take on modern heavy space rock, informed in opener “Staub” by the traditions of the genre but with a next-generational point of view, daring a bit of cosmic boogie and still having room for an improv-sounding solo in the six-minute track before they bring back the hook for a noisy finish. Noise, whether it’s distortion or effects or just a crunchier riff like that of the post-something-and-I’m-not-sure-what-maybe-human “Unbehagen,” is a major factor in the proceedings. Still recording live and benefitting from that particular energy-conveyance — Felix Margraf, who mixed and mastered West Mata, helmed the recording for AANK, and they tracked in a venue space — the band remain dynamic in the roilingly heavy “Ikarus” (also the longest cut at 6:51), and are dynamic in the groove beneath the forward wash the song posits. Compared to the defined strum of “Staub” at the outset or even the likewise krautified urging of “Finsternis” — though both of those are noisy by some measure as well — “Ikarus” is way, way out, and situated at the presumed start of side B, it gives AANK a delightfully dug-in launch to the second half.
But the album is less about the vinyl split than some, and listening in a linear format, “Ikarus” is cleverly informed by the divergence before it of the title-track. “AANK” is three and a half minutes of softly picked acoustic guitar notes built out with some probably highly specific synth or effects. Either way, it is peaceful, serene, folkish, and gorgeous in a way one wishes more bands would dare to be, and it bolsters the atmosphere not only of “Ikarus” after it or “Schnee” before, but of AANK more broadly in a way that answers how it got to be the song the album was named after. Kombynat Robotron may not be a band known for subtlety, but whether it’s the interaction between the songs or the way the builds take place within them and the verses unfold across the span, there is likewise depth of mix and character for the listener to engage with, and the album becomes one where the person hearing it decides their own course and just how immersed they want to be. Can you hear the noise rock beneath all the noise in “Sauerstoff?” Do you want to? And so on. Wherever you want to meet it, AANK is there waiting.
Maybe that’s the underlying change, too. I won’t say that Kombynat Robotron‘s prior work wasn’t engaging, having enjoyed engaging with it on however many occasions I have, but the level of that engagement has changed in accord with their methodology. With AANK, the trio begin to realize the power their songs have to affect the audience, and it may well be that subsequent releases will see the band continue to develop along these lines, writing songs to put their listeners where they want them to be in place, time or mood. It’s an awfully neat story for some blogger like me to make palpable for the one or two people on the planet who might be reading, but real life is rarely so orderly. The truth of what Kombynat Robotron do on AANK is that it makes them a less, not more, predictable band, and there’s zero reason they need to choose one or the other between outright jamming and building structured material from out of those jams.
AANK may be the setting of a new pattern, and if it is, and if the band want to take these songs on the road and become a touring act of broader reach throughout Europe, you’ll certainly get no argument from me. There’s big potential here in terms of reach, and having Fuzz Club on their side won’t hurt the hype factor that’s already given them momentum. But if you’re looking for the experimentalist aspect, zoom out a level. It’s the entire album that’s the experiment this time, and the band’s success in their endeavor calls out to an international underground that may or may not know it’s been waiting for the call, but surely has been.
Posted in Whathaveyou on May 28th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Now signed to Fuzz Club Records, Kiel, Germany, cosmic rockers Kombynat Robotron give a rather terrestrial look on the first single from their new album, AANK, riding a noisy riff and blown-out vocals for three minutes where six months ago on Dec. 2024’s West Mata (review here), they could be heard space-kraut jamming through three extended tracks, the shortest of which was 11 minutes long. There are eight tunes on AANK, and I’m willing to bet they’re not all so brief, but change is the order of the universe, and that would seem to apply here as well, as otherworldly as Kombynat Robotron sometimes are.
So, intrigue. Hooray. One is reminded of Dutch heavy psych rockers The Machine, who in the 2010s brought noise rock influences to their riffier context. It doesn’t seem like a huge bridge to cross from one to the other, between noise riffs and heavy riffs — at a certain point, riffs is riffs; and if I can add to that: riff riff riff — but either way, it’s cool to hear their exploration taking on new dimensions.
From the PR wire:
Kombynat Robotron – AANK
FUZZ CLUB RECORDS
Release: 18.07.2025
With driving rhythms, repetitive riffs and spherical soundscapes, Kombynat Robotron create a hypnotic sound that blurs the boundaries between krautrock, psychedelic and noise rock. The Kiel-based trio has been an integral part of the European psychedelic rock scene since its formation in 2018 and stands for raw energy, musical freedom and rampant improvisation.
With six studio albums acclaimed by fans and critics on labels such as Tonzonen Records, Cardinal Fuzz Records, Clostridium Records and Little Cloud Records, as well as various tape and split releases and shows with bands such as Elder, Verstärker and Kungens Män, Kombynat Robotron has made a name for itself as an uncompromising (live) band that carries the spirit of Krautrock into the present day. Whether at international festivals or the stages of small clubs – their live shows are regarded as energetic sound trips where every performance is unique. Kombynat Robotron is not a retrospective – they are pulsating proof that psychedelic rock can still be bold, loud and boundless today.
Now in their seventh year, Kombynat Robotron are back with their seventh studio album. AANK will be released on July 18 via the London-based label FUZZ CLUB RECORDS (home of A Place To Bury Strangers, The Black Angels, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and many more), which became aware of the band through a Kombynat show in London in the summer of 2024 and signed the band shortly after.
On AANK, Kombynat Robotron work with vocals and song structures for the first time, moving away from their musical beginnings as an instrumental jam band. Kraut and psychedelic rock can still be found on AANK, but more focused and with more heaviness than in the past. The flowing psychedelic soundscapes of the bands previous records give way to the asphalt of the sound Autobahn. Between Staub and Finsternis, the Kombynat races, noises and rages on a total of eight songs. Heavy noisy walls of sound are build on top of repetitive bass grooves, distant vocals emerge from a sonic landscape that lies between chaos and control.
The Kombynat flies to the stars and presents itself on AANK louder, faster and harder, but also quieter and more thoughtful than ever before. AANK is not an optimistic album, but rather a realistic one. The lyrics revolve around topics such as decay and disintegration, loss (of control) and the eternal struggle with the world.
Recording a whole album with actual songs and vocals might sound strange for a band that has released six albums with instrumental jams before that, but it is the result of a natural development. The songs were mostly formed out of recorded jams that felt too good to let them go and never play them again, and after all songs are just recognized and reproduceable jams.
The band spent about two years of constant work on their new approach towards creating structures and writing songs and did lots of live experiments with the new material. While the songs took some time to take their final form, once they were ready the recording of AANK only took one weekend. The band set up their equipment at Kulturzentrum Karnak, a small venue in Kassel in the middle of Germany. Together with recording engineer Felix Margraf they managed to capture the spirit of their raw live energy by recording everything live, together in one room.
AANK reflects the musical development on Kombynat Robotron from hippie-esque psychedelic space music to fuzzed-out noise krautrock and embraces its influences by creating something new. Musik für das Ohr der Zukunft. Robotron over.
Posted in Whathaveyou on January 27th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
This week, on Jan. 31, Kiel, Germany’s Earthbong will take part in Sloth-Fest in Erfurt, and I’ve seen them confirmed for Blue Moon Festival in July as well, so no, the April dates below and the prior stop the bong metal three-piece will make in Iceland for ReykjaDoom 2025 aren’t the sum-total of their current and upcoming live plans. And yes, I’m well aware these shows were posted in November. I know.
As to why they’re here again, well, on the most basic level, it’s killer that a band like Earthbong, who are on the more extreme end of a heavy aesthetic and about as dug in as you get to longform, weighted, generally pretty slow riffs, are undertaking something like scooting to the other side of the planet just days after swinging through Iceland and doing a round of shows. If you get to see them in whatever part of the world, that’s awesome. But it’s also probably a landmark for the band members themselves, like, as human beings. I know I’d mark something like this down as a ‘life event,’ anyhow, and I don’t think that’s any less valid because I do the same for grocery shopping.
Album this year? Didn’t I hear something about that? I can never remember, so put it down as a maybe. Don’t worry though. If one happens, you’ll hear it coming long before it actually gets here.
Tour dates and the ReykjaDoom poster. You could see Earthbong and Ufomammut on the same day if you live right:
ReykjaDoom 2025 takes place from April 4-5 at Gaukurinn Reykjavik and the australia tour dates are:
April 11 Geelong The Vault April 12 Adelaide Crown & Anchor April 17 Wollongong La La La’s April 18 Canberra Pot Belly April 19 Stoned To Death Fest Sydney April 24 Melbourne Gaso April 26 SunBurn 6 Festival Frankston
Tour artwork by Nils Sackewitz
Earthbong is: Mersel (Selly) Nuhiji: bass + vocals Claas (Ogo) Ogorek: guitar Thomas (Tommy) Handschick: drums
Posted in Reviews on January 3rd, 2025 by JJ Koczan
The album sets its theme around the sea, which is fair enough, but if you find yourself drawn toward the sky, cosmos or some kind of other otherworldly landscape during the 40 minutes of West Mata, one could hardly blame Kombynat Robotron. At a certain point, expanse is expanse. Recorded in Spring 2023 at ZFML with Kio Krabbenhöft helming (Felix Margraf mixed and mastered), West Mata takes place over three extended tracks, beginning with the longest (immediate points) “Jason II” (21:54) on side A before “Vasa” (6:57) and “Trieste” (11:36) take hold across side B and setting out on a textured course of mindful drift in its initial going. Guitarist Jannes Ihnen echoes out across mellowpsych reaches, a tonal shimmer having emerged from a cocoon of drone gradually in the first couple minutes, and bassist Claas Ogorek and drummer Thomas Handschick — both also of the more crush-minded Earthbong — give the groove cohesion without taking away from the fluidity, which is an obvious priority for an album that, at some point or other, the band decided was about water.
As much fun as it can be and often is to accede to the whims of an album like West Mata, with a stated expressive purpose, the fact of the matter is that the subject being instrumentally explored can’t be effectively conveyed without real world chemistry underlying. That is to say, it wouldn’t matter what the songs were about if the songs didn’t take the listener anywhere. However, West Mata is duly transportive. “Jason II” doesn’t ever have the outward arrogance to be sweeping, but the howling guitar and residual distorted rumblings, the casual tap of the ride and snare acting as aural emulsifier, are so smooth that by the time Kombynat Robotron are eight minutes in, the pictures are vivid. A re-mellowing brings warmth of low end beneath a sparser lead layer, and though the song is only half over circa 10:45, what’s been laid out at that point is a single procession of slow movement. If you told me it was about the galaxial orbit or the superposition of quantum states, I don’t think I’d be able to fight you and say, “No way, boss! It’s the ocean!” with more than their say-so to back me up. Granted that’s not nothing, but six LPs and however-many whatever-elses later — earlier in 2024, they took part in a four-way split (review here) for Worst Bassist Records, for example — Kombynat Robotron aren’t so closed in the evocations on a sheer sonic level.
This sounds like a critique of the band, or like I’m saying they didn’t accomplish their goal in basing West Mata around the sea. I’m not saying that at all. I’m just saying that whether you think “Jason II” is about horror flicks or Argonauts, there’s room in the material itself for your interpretation. Kombynat Robotron have an open, jam-based approach to psychedelia, and West Mata is rich in atmosphere as well as tone. If you didn’t know “Vasa” was named for a 17th century Swedish shipwreck or “Trieste” for the first vessel to submerge into the Mariana Trench, or indeed that the album itself is named for a chain of active volcanoes near the Pacific Island of Tonga, you can probably still appreciate the serenity with which “Jason II” (perhaps named for a model of submersible) contemplates its back half, or the transition to a more physical rhythm in “Vasa,” or the noisier crux of “Trieste.”
This is not a weakness. West Mata is what it was intended to be, and more. A given listener’s choice whether or not to engage with the thematic will invariably play into how they hear the material — the power of suggestion is always a factor, but on general principle, you won’t hear me rag on a band for the decision to apply narrative to their work — and however they go, the point is that Kombynat Robotron are headed out.
With a progression between its songs that moves from the least to arguably the most active material — if you want to quibble on “active” between the boogie of “Vasa” and the scorch of “Trieste,” I’ll cite the careening, daring-toward-abrasive finish of the latter as the noisiest and busiest stretch included among the three cuts — there is a strong sense of a plan at work, but at no point in West Mata are Kombynat Robotron too heavy-handed in it. There are changes, of course, as one part evolves into the next and the personality of a work begins to take shape, and each piece seems to reset before it begins its own plunge, but movement overarching is from a minimal sound to a wash (you bet your ass I intended that pun), and that linearity lends a distinctive set of purpose to the proceedings, heady though it is. But it’s okay. Somehow I think if you can put up with reading this review up to this point, ‘heady’ won’t be too much of a threat to keep you from enjoying a 40-minute long-player. Just speculating.
In the interest of honesty, and maybe this came through in the discussion above whether I wanted it to or not, I let go of the watery foundation pretty quickly with West Mata. I tend to think of a style like Kombynat Robotron‘s on more cosmic terms — and for sure the band are no stranger to those — and that’s where my head went, with “Trieste” boasting a somewhat darker ambience as it departs the cacophony to leave residual drone and amplifier hum. Whether that’s the last thing you hear before you fall in the singularity or come up to the surface with the ocean on all sides, the album holds up. That isn’t necessarily a surprise for Kombynat Robotron, who’ve been at it with all due proficiency to suit a genre existing well outside of normal spacetime for eight years or so, but it does account for the surehanded guidance they provide to the mediation in sound happening here. And if you take that mediation in a different direction, I can’t imagine anybody’s gonna yell at you. No one is going to say you’re wrong. Have your own experience. I got away with it so far.
Posted in Whathaveyou on November 20th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
You ever put on the wrong record? Well, yesterday, I had the wrong record on, and it wasn’t until I stopped it and put on Kombynat Robotron‘s upcoming three-song LP West Mata instead that I realized it. The German cosmic-jam expeditionists — who share members with the more plundering but also longform-prone Earthbong — will release the album Dec. 6 through a multinational consortium that includes Cardinal Fuzz, Little Cloud Records and Clostridium Records. It’s not an insignificant amount of support for an instrumental improv-based space rock outfit, but I mean, I get it. Maybe West Mata was the right record for all of them too.
No public audio yet, but the release date’s Dec. 6, so coming around quick. Preorders are up from everybody, and the links are below. The PR wire brings more about the record’s aquatic theme:
Kombynat Robotron – West Mata – Release: Dec 6th 2024
West Mata is the 6th studio record by Kiel/Germany based Psych/Krautrockband Kombynat Robotron. The release of this album is the result of a cooperation between Clostridium Records (Germany), Cardinal Fuzz Records (UK) and Little Cloud Records (USA).
After their space-themed record -270°C (2021) and the following, earth-themed record Frohe Zukunft (2023) Kombynat Robotron are closing the circle with the waterthemed West Mata.
With a total length of about 50 minutes split in three tracks the band returns to their long-form jam-based approach to songwriting on West Mata.
For thousands of years, the sea has been both a place of longing and an antagonist for mankind and, despite being fully explored, it still resists all of mankind’s efforts and technical sophistications. The eternal continuity of the sea is taken up as a musical motif by all three tracks on West Mata. Seemingly stoic and unchanging, the rhythm undulates in the depths and yet every moment is full of change and movement on the surface.
In 21 minutes, Jason 2 unfolds it’s wings like a manta ray and takes us from Greek mythology to modern satellite technology: silvery sound surfaces that merge in silent agreement, come together to form the same and yet always different shapes, disappear and emerge again.
A look into the depths belies the impression of timelessness, because the history of exploring and mastering the seas is always also a history of hubris and failure. The wreck of the Vasa, which sank on its maiden voyage almost 400 years ago due to a design flaw, had not yet been recovered when the Titanic sank in 1912 after colliding with an iceberg. A story, a motif, told in ever-changing variations. It has always been the same, same old story.
With Trieste the album finally plunges into the endless depths of the ocean. The movement forward is a movement downwards, driven by the belief that there is something to be discovered and understood even in the most hostile environment. We can just hope that the steel shell can withstand the pressure that increases with every meter and hope we can catch a glimpse of the abyss before the abyss looks back in us. Get in and look into the depths.
Das Album will be released in three different vinyl editions:
