Three-piece outfit KUF, featuring keys, bass and drums, cooks up a sound that is as warm, cozy and
exciting as it is utterly alien. The rhythm section hints at the great history of dirty funk and bouncing
R&B, but the grooves are firmly of today: dance-centered, thrillingly interactive and broken up at the
best possible joints.
The bewildering thing about KUF is that it is a vocal-led group that has no singer on stage at all. All
vocal elements are based on self-recorded samples which keyboard whizz kid Tom Schneider melds,
bends and squeezes in real time. As if it was the most natural thing to do. With no artificial
synchronization in place, Valentin Link on bass and Hendrik Havekost on drums push the disembodied
voices into an arena of hyperintegrated realtime magic of rough soul, intertwined by improvised
outbursts and shaped with the aesthetics of raw MPC-based cut-up techno.
The album's grabbing openers 'Gold' and 'Princess' are full-on instances of the brightly burning world
of KUF, with the other ten tunes never ever letting you down. All along, the Berlin based trio take their
audiences through a full range of emotions and constantly shifting dynamics. The thorough integration
of this extraordinary degree of sheer diversity into a unified experience is simply astonishing. But
never forget this is a live band, and that's how anything here has been developed: live, in direct
interplay. Seeing is believing.