- Like many Kann artists, Philipp Matalla's take on dance music is filled with outside influences. You can hear it in his DJ mixes, which span bizarre and rich selections, while his productions teem with bright musicality owed to disco, house and funk. It's been three years since the Berlin/Leipzig artist last put out a record, but in that time it seems his crate of eclectic influences has soaked in. Kiba, Matalla's second 12-inch for Kann, is a beautiful swarm of sounds that moves beyond glossy disco-house to freely experiment with form.
The EP has a feel of the rural outdoors, from both its warm isolation and an array of textures that includes insectoid noisemakers and faintly barking dogs. Everything else—the softly rotating rhythms, the elated melodies—clunk with the tangibility of woodblocks and sheet metal. Taking up the full A-side, "Kiba" is a stirring house track with an ethereal motion, becoming brighter and more glistening as it billows upwards. At nine minutes and with an elegantly intensifying groove, it's the record's most danceable track, and also its most absorbing.
The B-side holds three shorter cuts that are more unconventional. "Sloppy Sobbing" has a sparse atmosphere built from keys and rickety, barely there percussion. "Swetched" begins as a kind of neo-funk instrumental, and then, split by an unexpected gong strike, reshapes into an abstract stretch of bells and bass guitar. In groove and energy, "Zed" is most like Matalla's earlier house but with a curious new sense of construction.
TracklistA1 Kiba
B1 Sloppy Sobbing
B2 Zed
B3 Swetched