Original release by Industrial Ölocaust Recordings (
cardinium.com)
Kula is the ritual exchange of gifts practiced among the people of the Trobriand Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Shell necklaces and other ornamental objects, which take on magical-religious meanings, are exchanged between the various islands during the ceremony, following a circular route.
The album is inspired by this, following the same circularity: a ritual journey from night to dawn, from the hypnagogic phase, the visions between sleep and wakefulness, passing through the deepest sleep, the dream and then the awakening and reality.
The ancestral world connects organically to the modern world; analog merges with digital; concrete sounds, recordings of ethnic percussion and tribal chants integrate with synthesizers and electronic manipulations.
“Kula is a symbolic exchange generating syncretic cosmologies. Sound and polyphonic embrace, a mixture of connections and celestial atmospheres.
Kula as a digital-tribal ritual amplifies new forms of life than explodes within vibrant environments.
Kula is synthetic-synesthetic meditation that escapes the boundaries of anthropocentrism and then dances among mechanical ghosts, ancestral loops, and brilliant comets.
A mad explosion of endless loops where new constellations arise for a deep inner journey. Reciprocity and gift are Kula’s private nouns reacting to and for the encounter: a loop uncovering a ceremony of restitution.
Cosmogonies, cosmologies and cosmos rotate within a plural inhabiting for a spiritual experience beyond the end of the world and within transcendent endings of infinite s-cul(p)tures. “
Giorgio Cipolletta
REVIEWS:
- SoWhat [by Luca Giuoco]
sowhatmusica.wordpress.com/2024/01/23/zakhme-kula/
-Vital Weekly #1424 [by Frans de Waard]
www.vitalweekly.net/number-1424/
released January 23, 2024
Recorded and composed by Zakhme in 2022
Alessandro Barbanera: guitars, synths, field recordings, analog tape machine, found sounds
Gianluca Ceccarini: guitars, synths, field recordings, electroacoustic objects
Text: Giorgio Cipolletta
Mixing, production, sound design: Alessandro Barbanera
Photo & graphic: Nahid Rezashateri, Gianluca Ceccarini