KOMPUTER MARKET LED ALBUM MUTE, PLAYGROUND RELEASE: SEPTEMBER 16, 2002 REVIEW: OCTOBER 16, 2002

Great Britain's Komputer seems to be a very conceptual band. Perhaps Komputer is not a band at all, but a computer. A German one, of course, to accord for the spelling and for the unmistakably German tint of the music it produces.
The Komputer is running an emulator, kind of like the downloadable programs that allow you to play old C64 games on your PC. The emulator can be set at any point in music history, creating a perfect interpretation of the sound. In 1998 this program was set in the Kraftwerk era, and a nice history lesson was produced.
Moving the indicator needle forward all the way to the start of the new millennium, the program creates an artistic, but not unduly demanding presentation of the sound defect-obsessed genre of clicks’n’cuts. According to reliable sources, the Komputer has been used to emulate the sounds of both the
eighties and the nineties during the four years between “The World of Tomorrow” and “Market Led”, but these products have not been made available for our education.
As mentioned, the history of electronic music tends to become Germanized in this Komputer, and again the data fed into the program seems to have it’s origin there, with traceable input coming from Matmos and other similar artists. Distinctive traits are disturbing everyday noises such as those of electronic malfunctioning, mixed with beats and more friendly sounds of pianos other regular instruments. Komputer offers us a pleasant introduction, which leaves us hungry for the real challenge.

MATTIAS HUSS