Review: kajkyt - II

II achieves a really strategic form of intimidation, like a cluster of concrete pillars sparingly arranged so as to block out the entirety of the sun’s circadian trajectory. I’m reminded of Godflesh for the record’s repressed violence; the sense of the seething unspoken, reduced to internalised revolts against the clinical, apathetic dominance of machine and routine process. The drum programming is particularly menacing; blows of iron hammers and bass drums echo immaculately against vertical surfaces, remaining dynamically unresponsive to the swooping overheard feedback and hushed voices of dual ritual.

There is a tension caused by the emotion bubbling beneath the grey, and II smacks of a cathartic prelude. While the band’s sound is most prominently synonymous with the circular monotony of the production line, there is also a subtle allusion to spiritual arousal in the persistent bore of repetition – a strange inversion of numbing labour into a transcendence of industrial worship, in a strange, meditative enactment of John Cage’s suggestion: “if something is boring for two minutes, try it for four”. I am unfeeling toward the bass loops in their early stages – which crawl between the bars like angular, attack-devoid slugs – but by the power of loop they gain significance and visceral connection; I feel as though my pulse and breathing align with the rhythms that assert themselves over and over, turning my organs into an extension of kajkyt’s unending machine.