G76 & Zefzeed latest project departs from the DJ role in favour of something more introspective: a live act designed for the club. The one-and-a-half-hour performance resembles a continuous sound collage in which different sound worlds are juxtaposed.
GEF's music doubles as a means of fantastic transport. For their first live club performance, they've put together a template of synthesisers, modules and keyboards, and the deeper you get into the mix, the more adventurous it gets. Soldered together from elements of industrial and ambient, they've added an extra layer of depth with oriental influences. Their ground groove is driven by an off-road vehicle that puts its suspension to the test.
As the mix progresses, the producers add considerable emotional weight. The songs are all cut from the same cloth, but they're just different enough to catch your ear one after the other. Distortion has always played a key role in their music, but it has never sung the way it does here.
Conventional linear space-time breaks down and is crushed beneath the mix's lumbering 4/4 heartbeat and successive waves of distortion. As each wave recedes, samples trickle forward into the mix. Voices and textures rise and fall in eerie inversion. Overlapping, implied melodies flicker into focus, then disappear. There's a "deep-rooted melancholy," a sensibility passed down from traditional Middle Eastern music that is captured in GEF's sound around minute 27. The live performance continues shortly after with an incantation: the vocal samples used convey a deep heaviness; the halting drums and minor key sound mournful and haunting.
GEF turns roots into branches. Their nonchalant camaraderie is the password to a cathartic club.