‘Soft’, ‘snow’, ‘honey’... gentle smooth ambient right? Wrong. Very wrong.

“Take Your Honey” is a single 22-minute live jam recording of voice and electronics from the Berlin-based duo. It’s a thorough and harsh disassembly of what might once have been a song- where the sparse lyrics come from. It’s now buried in distortion, grit, reverb, noise, sometimes anger, and vocal anguish (“I know it hurts” over, and over…). It sits somewhere between industrial electronica and pure noise.

It’s not constantly aggressive, thankfully. There are dips in energy, for example around the 10 minute mark, when things get a bit dubbier and more introspective, and that’s when some of the more interesting textures pop up. Some of the live ping-pong looping, pitch-shifting and repetition is genuinely clever stuff when you focus on some of the details.

Overall though this is raw and thoroughly emotive material that was probably absolutely captivating if you could have been there for the live performance. In a recording though there’s something a little alienating about it, a sense of being cut out of this expression, an antagonistic sonic cliqueyness that left me feeling slightly cold.