David Kaplowitz: Concerning Bats (music for emotionally distraught AI's)
A brief glance at the track-listing for DKAPZ's first solo release gives a fairly large clue as to what has informed this album of grainy headstrong electronica and twisted minimal house beats. Composed mainly between March 2020 & March 2021, David, himself, describes the emotional core of his startling music as stemming from 'various stages of alarm, distress, depression, and awe at 2020-21 Earth': a subject we can all relate to, then.

Kaplowitz, an American who has been based in London for the last 20 years, has a wealth of experience in both the musical and visual arts, gained long before the year of the plague. A video producer who has worked with everyone from BBC Radio 3 to The Royal Opera and the Sadler's Wells Theatre, he has, meanwhile, forged a parallel career as an experimental musician and sound designer. Classically-trained as a saxophonist, Kaplowitz found himself drawn to electronics when he studied music theory & composition at the University of Virginia, going on to be the first assistant at their brand new computer music lab in the late '80s. Following a period spent playing keys and sax for various post-funk bands in San Francisco (Maximum Jizz, Groove Pigs, Grassy Knoll etc.), Kaplowitz relocated to London. Here - besides working with experimental bands like the notorious Cuntbucket (later to be known as Fingerhut) along with eminent names in the East End avant garde such as Terry Day and Steve Beresford - he continued to work on his own compositions and recordings. Finally, the enforced period of solitude and reflection that we all have endured has unlocked David's hard drives, and the results are stunning.

Concerning Bats contains a vast repository and almost alchemical combination of the styles and philosophies that have both informed and driven his work. Bold, shining textures, underpinned with glitchy beats lie alongside ambient washes and sheets of noisecore; often all in the same track ('The Interferon Pathway Phase II') . The track titles and the themes underlying them warn you that this is by no means an easy listen, but David's music, despite being mainly instrumental, has always held a radical, confrontational stance: 'We're All Fucking Fucked.' could easily be an updating of the angriest agit prop dub experiments of Adrian Sherwood and Mark Stewart. And yet, the album remains harmonically tasty with a vast dollop of grim humour at its core, as the 8-bit, DnB mayhem of 'Batshit Mario' proves.

Kaplowitz coins his approach as an 'attempt at walking the line between the visceral and cerebral'. And as with recent work by artists such as Beatrice Dillon, this is work that embraces both minimalism and a disregard for the formalities of technological boundaries. At times it's a brutal gut-punch of sound, at others it's a playful exploration of the oddities of rhythm. Call it what you like; it's pretty much batshit crazy.

Bio by Chris Jones