As part of the first batch of tapes of 2022/23, Artetetra is presenting a split featuring two éminences grises of minimal but highly imaginative audio storytelling. Kinked and Señor Service, who fully deserve the title of bedroom superstars, use their screens and musical tools as gateways and magic wands to dissolve the listener into uncertain and nebulous musical worlds, creating the clever illusion of a narrative. But remember, it's just an illusion! Pure audio préstidigitation for children and adult mammals alike.

Kinked describes itself as leftfield-ritualist of vocal gestures and granular realities. Part of the Riforma crew, he is also known as the visual and text researcher Lapo Sorride; also known as the tenco-grime lyricist Dori Sorride.

Señor Service is the solo project of Umberto Pasinetti, formerly 1/2 of New-Weirdo-Vibes label Pampsychia. Started in 2019 as a tender and humoristic music project, Señor Service feeds on cheeky plunderphonics and dreamy FM synthesis. It is 100% certified as always satisfactory. Until now, he has always delivered.

Delving into Kinked’s and Señor Service’s audio tales always feels like living instrumental coming-of-age adventures where the plot is tangled, multilinear and seldom controlled by actual characters. Entities, states of matter, places, words, minerals, air pressure, stuff and fantastic creatures are shuffled and spawned randomly across scenarios where encounters are aleatory and superfluous. Nothing really happens, if you don’t want it to. Figures like stoner chimeras are shown in glimpses and parts, as cardboard props behind a cloud of pot smoke.

As heard from the men themselves, side A, REINCANTO, is the introductory journey into the affairs of an entity named CALDO, with five arms and two bodies in one. It is also inspired by the atmospheres of the film work “Carnivale”, and is presented as an improvisation on DAW between vocal gestures searching for a phonetics of mutations, filtered by the ROLAND VT3 multi effect and harmonic encodings bestowed by a YAMAHA PSR E363 keyboard.

On the other hand, inspired by the freshest children's library music, bubbling ambient and the cozy cute contemporary experiments, side B, Real Bwoy, feels like a HD puppet theater; an exploration of digital ventriloquism where voices and vocal samples do not belong to anybody. Real Bwoy is a trickery reminding us that there are only grown-up children on the internet. An example of quirky, magical storytelling.

Like a miniature roller coaster or a surreal, campy carrousel at a free party, the sides – or should we say tales? – ultimately feel as tangled and mind-boggling aural objects suspended in between an audio-book and weird auditory hallucinations on helium. Disappearing noses, uncertain exoduses, IRL Carnivals and village fun pave the way for a simple but effective reenchantment of our underappreciated surroundings and inner-life happenings, delicate nonsensical gags and little mind-tricks. These sonic realities just last as long as the spools move, vanishing right after the tape has stopped. Witty enchantments trapped in atmosphere-reflective bubbles.

“There’s a party in my head and you are all invited!”
They grow up so fast…