Chris Daly has been to a Hofbrau Haus or two.
Germany. Land of beer steins and wurst (or techno and shizer videos, depending on your tastes. I don’t judge.) For an American, it can be a different kind of place. While I personally found the people very friendly on my sole visit to date, they still tended to be a reserved lot that didn’t necessarily warm immediately to outgoing (read: loud and obnoxious) Americans. Of course, I also got tanked with a bunch of local, possibly homeless musicians who may or may not have offered to sell me one of their own crew for a pair of shoes after about 10 shots of Jager, but that’s another story entirely. And it probably also speaks to my terrible language skills, but I digress.
If you’ve ever spent time abroad in a foreign land, you know that it’s exhilarating, terrifying, eye-opening and lonesome all at the same time. Project: Mooncircle beat artist KRTS provides a firsthand, instrumental account of his experiences doing the same on “The Foreigner.” The former Brooklynite recently transplanted to Germany following a world tour of his “The Dread of an Unknown Evil,” and the experience clearly left its mark.
Utilizing warm synths, hip hop percussion and his own, ghostly vocals, KRTS creates a down tempo masterpiece that might just be his best work yet. With titles like “Berlin Girls” and “Sunrise Over Warschauer,” the inspirational sources are obvious. And yet, there is nothing distinctly “German” about the music. If anything, it’s more low key than a lot of the electronic music coming out of Deutschland these days, which, quite frankly, has always been one of my favorite thing about the Berlin-based P:M label.
KRTS draws on emotional resonance and heartfelt emotion to convey his vision to the listener. The grooves are gentle, but engaging, much like the country appeared to me a scant, few years ago. KRTS successfully uses beats to paint pictures of streets that are not his own, but ones with which he clearly is starting to identify. If he keeps dropping beasts like this, it’s not going to be too long before KRTS can get rid of the foreigner tag completely because the locals are going to want to claim him for their own.
