Illat - VOLT OTT

 Released: May 2

Functionally a debut of the newest moniker for Hungarian artist Gábor Kovács, VOLT OTT is rather fun little minimalist album that uses all manner of tiny little sounds to comprise eleven surprisingly complex pieces. So, to try and explain it a bit better, imagine each track a bit as a collage made of very small bits of paper taped together. This album is essentially that in audio format. Gábor plays around with this theme in a lot of different ways, some of which sound kind of melodic while others are very much not. But everything feels very upfront, with seemingly little amounts of reverb, delay, or other methods of smearing or smudging the sounds. Instead, the sounds feel very crisp and clear, even if they still feel fragmented and patchwork. 

Some of the more melodic pieces make themselves so through the vehicle of a single sounds in the mix. “A03” is a great example here as it takes a single piano (I think its a piano at least) and plays a rather simple but fragmented melody on it while the auxiliary pieces of sounds click, pop, and jitter softly around it. The keys, while dry sounding, have a certain element of movement as the shift across the stereo stage from one side to the other with the faintest of glitchy-ness to it. Immediately after is “A04” which also tends towards the more melodic but this one just has a slightly comical feel to it. I think its something about the bounce the melody appears to have, yet it still maintains that slight glitch to it, almost like the loop runs into itself or something with a periodic clicking.

I kind of get the impression that the two sides of this album are divided by the amount of tendency towards the melodic because the second half seems decidedly more noisy. Although it’s not particularly a hard rule as “B09” kind of breaks with this. It is certainly more clicks and noisy but there is a rather clever sound selection here with this wavy synths-sounding wah-like sound that pops up among the clicks and taps. But regardless of how it’s divided, the experience was invigorating for me.  I really loved the patchwork feel of everything, down to the very small feeling of the individual sounds. It feels like a kind of soothing instability in its construction that is helped by the immediacy of the individual sounds.