When you are willfully divergent and askew to the point that logic dictates your bandname as ¡NO!, its ungooglability is going to bite you sooner or later. In my clunky and uninteresting journey from typewriter to Macbook Pro, inverting an exclamation mark is a skill that has eluded me, and my exclamatory sentences and clauses have been all sorts of shamefully shabby as a result.
In a need to ¡NO! context, I could therefore only paste an immediately available reference to access a portal for this group and its sonic outfall.
But this rebirth of sorts offers all, sundry and indeterminate a convenient workaround – After an unspecified length of consideration, ¡NO! has changed its name to ZEROPUNKT, because apparently “The 0ught of N0ught is the point of zer0. NO. N. 0. The zer0 Number. The p0iNt. Zeropunkt.” …and while it reads like a load of guff, perhaps this is all the rationale we currently require…
So to herald this momentous occasion TAFKA¡NO! bestows upon us a digital single, BITCH NAILS for consideration/meditation/consternation.
The track commences with a repeated keyboard and distorted bass motif, the later growling as if to test the patience of a sound engineer, but subdued in its sparsity. This is all set up to introduce what was previously referred to as “noir sax meander”, and in every positive way we have compositional relativity to that which was featured on 2017’s excellent SEDIMENTS album.
But, just in case you were settling in to the expectation of an arty elevator installation for a continental Le Méridien, everything slips beautifully off-key somewhere around the 2:35 minute mark, with the ever-increasing intrusion of cymbal washes and some indeterminate chiming – it’s a wonderfully creepy intestinal tangent.
Eventually resolving itself (isn’t that what you’re supposed to say when anything is remotely improvisational & jazzy?) back where the underlying melody originally kicked in, BITCH NAILS strolls toward its it’s 8:45 minute demise with strangely tranquilising psychedelic ambience – A pinch of feedback for dissonant flavour and it’s all over.
This is apparently a taster for two studio albums on the horizon in 2019 and 2020 – as well as the reconstitution of CONCRETE SOUP, a series of collaborative concerts with various other leftfield rabble…
The prospect leaves me feeling spoilt… impatient, but spoilt!!!
