33: 33-69

Billy Bultheel & Alexander Iezzi aka 33’s killer debut LP of sharp cuts between hardcore rave, DIY classical chamber music, Trance arps and performance art punk - think a Duma throwdown with Diamanda Galas and yr halfway there. Pitting Anne Imhof-collaborator Billy Bultheel in a ravenous session with Iezzi and a host of input from NAKED, Dylan Kerr, Ivan Cheng, and Patrick Belaga; ’33-69’ stages an opulent complex of numerological enigmas and swarming spirits unbound from tradition. Disrupting disciplines and paradigms in each cut, they enact a ravishing rush of dancefloor drama and tormented cabaret that feels like the 1920’s rushing into the 2020’s, resulting in a time-sick and urgent avalanche of ideas from Leider or Baroque barbed in noise and hardcore rave alacrity, like a performance art piece held in the midst of Berghain or Kit Kat club’s most spangled, gloriously messy moments. As the first C.A.N.V.A.S. release of 2022, ’33-69’ builds on the sprawling ideas and feelings outlined by Olan Monk, Lugh, Elvin Branhdi, Michael Speers and Alpha Maid since 2018 with a strident confidence that meets the new decade head-on, face-first, as it gets to grips with new cultural schisms and energies. Tearing out with the shearing digital noise and soaring elegance of Ivan Cheng’s vox on ‘369’, it prangs out between machine-gunned trance techno in ‘Fireworks’ to operatic pipe organ and string processional ‘Sexus’ starring countertenor Steve Katona (collaborator of Pan Daijing and specialist in Bach recitals), beside an extraordinary mauling of industrial and BM ritualism on ‘The knife’ featuring a feral NAKED in its seat-edge first half. The second half slips below the belt with a virulent thrust in the panel-beating techno tribalism of ‘Pigeons’, and hinges around brusque techno triplets with the cabaret keys and Italianate trance motifs of ‘Sirens’, before PAN’s cellist-composer Patrick Balaga helps pull it back from the brink in ‘Thomas The Obscure’, lending a fine temper to the crazed/reflective narrative before it launches in a full out techno assault on ‘Heaven’s blade’ and the smoky, distorted growl of ’Speed and beer’ makes perhaps the most unhinged and ultimately moving use of a brass section you’ll likely hear for time. Stunning.