Zep Tepi by Creode

The duo of Samantha Flowers and Tyler Hicks have been perfecting their dulcet tones for over ten years now. Combining, as if in a cauldron, blender, or analogous mixing device equal parts Detroit basement blues, Wackie's style studio murk magic and an old hard drive packed to the brim with Mutant Sounds downloads, they have managed something truly rare in this most dismal of decades: sonics recognizably their own. These Kosmischen Kuriere also excel at another uncommon trait given time/place, restraint, the release in question being their first transmission since the 2021's excellent Obe Ready on Easy Listening. Zep Tepi finds our heroes in fine, dare I even say refined form, graduating from the same Berlin School that counts J.D. Emmanuel, Didier Bocquet, Osidarta &c. among its esteemed alumni. This is no mere retro voyage to yoga studios or Emeralds gigs of yore though, there is something deeply unwell, the surface sheen cracking up somewhere along the tape's third track, as swirling dread electronics bore a hole straight to Hades. What begins as celestial junket veers towards a grotesque hall of mirrors, your regret-laden past and bleak future joining forces in mocking salute (this could simply be projection though, astral or otherwise). Backmasked synth patches, muted analog gurgle and the buzzing from a disconnected rotary dial serve as lubricant to pry open the listener's third eye, and the contents therein will please anyone who's wantlist has ever featured its share of guys who look like (and very well may have been) pre dot-com crash computer programmers and/or gatefold sleeve art depicting chess boards floating in deep space. By the final crystalline (both in terms of shimmering acoustic character and resemblance to SAB's 1978 album on Vanity, obviously) pulses of the seventh untitled mini-epic the event horizon has been breached, full ego death attained. Grade A head music from stem to stern. -- Thomas D'Angelo, Feb. '25

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