Peter Kirn – 4Q246

Arab-American producer Peter Kirn is an avid electronic musician with interests in different artistic disciplines, who has worked in subjects such as modern dance, fashion, clubbing, space exploration, instruments and vocals, trained in composition and musicology, and also researched and written about new tools for music and visual creation on CDM.link.

Peter Kirn joins the Industrial Complexx catalogue with 4Q246, an album that showcases his creative prowess in mixing different textures. A review of his previous releases shows that he is not comfortable with a predetermined sound, but that each work is the fruit of exploration, and that it is almost impossible to predict the style and technique of his albums without prior listening.

Perhaps, it is somewhat easier to guess the sonic character of 4Q246 simply because it is released on a label like Industrial Complexx, with a quite determined style, but it is equally surprising with the harmonic combinations he uses in each of its seven tracks, as he bases the sound on multiple frequency alloys, which turns the album into a powerful sonic story. Peter Kirn mixes diverse sources, from metallic textures to other organic elements, distorted, unfathomable or elaborate rhythmic structures.  

4Q246 is an elegy and an archaic dance for prophetic visions, in all their conflicting dualities, told as a series of apocalyptic or revelatory musical fragments.

The title 4Q246 is taken from the Aramaic Apocalypse fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, found by a Bedouin in a cave at Qumran. Despite all the attempts to see this through a proto-Christian filter, I was drawn most by its vivid description of the trauma of another age, and against it the Aramaic word “ziqaya” (possibly “meteors” or “comets.”) There is some beauty in the unknowability of this fragment. It’s a half-erased foretelling of the future, and in its coding some of our own attempts to divine the world around us in both cosmology and geopolitics, to attempt to make sense out of the violence.

Artcover: Mimusa

Release date: January 27th, 2021.