Album: Underwater

"A musical marriage, made in cyberspace"
What happens when an unconventional intellectual creator of sounds, with his apparently incompatible preferences for 70s art rock and modern computer sounds, meets a Mexican mystic, vocal artist, and groove specialist?
Zinkl, the quiet type with a predilection for composing wondrously charming and delightfully unwieldy treasures, and Alquimia, the enigmatic Mexican music sensualist who runs a club for experimental music in her self-imposed exile in London, certainly make an unusual couple. But they say opposites attract, and these two have deliberately sought each other out.
”Underwater“, their first joint album, unites Alquimia’s feeling for exotic but catchy melodies and polished vocal artistry with Zinkl’s off-beat sounds and percussion sequences combined with tricky 12-tone harmonies. In an act of creation the two musical night birds have turned their backs on all the trends and created a magical album: their apparently opposing aesthetic approaches have given rise to a dozen surprisingly homogeneous songs which at the same time are jewels that sparkle from every one of their many facets. Informed listeners will recognize associations ranging from Kate Bush to Stravinsky? yet there is really no equivalent in the modern pop world.

Alquimia, pronounced 'al-key-meea', is a singer, composer and sonic innovator who was born in Mexico, where she studied classical piano and voice from an early age. When she became interested in the ethnic musical styles of her home country, she learned to master various pre-Columbian percussion instruments and flutes. Her search for new sounds inspired her use of modern music technology. She has developed some revolutionary singing techniques (some of them involving electronic processors), opening up for her a whole range of electronic and natural new sounds to experiment and compose with.
Now living in London Alquimia incorporates a wide variety of influences into her unique style, ranging from Pre-Hispanic Mexican folk music, via mediaeval and classical music to ambient and even techno. She has collaborated and performed with many other artists. In England she created the "Electronicage" club in 1998, a place where visual artists and musicians perform, thus bringing life to electronics and electronics to life.

[ more albums from Alquimia ]

Zinkl has created his own unique brand of electronic music, weaving an intricate web of naive melodies; outbursts of distraught dissonance; powerful rhythms and mystical spheres – all seasoned with a dash of that inimitable 'Zinkl' mischievousness. Zinkl's four albums display an instrumental pop music full of suspense that sways back and forth like a pendulum between 'avant-garde' and 'easy (hard) listening'.

[ more albums from Zinkl ]