CEM - FORMA (LP)

CEM has gained international notoriety over the past years for bewitching club and festival audiences alike with his feverish, polymorphic and richly referential DJ sets. For his debut full-length album, FORMA, the Berlin-based Herrensauna founder momentarily departs the dancefl oor, instead contributing a refl ective and at times menacing compositional study on terror and temporal anachronism for our perplexing times. All six pieces were originally commissioned to accompany Portuguese artist Mauro Ventura’s performative installation of the same name, shown fi rst at the Volksbühne in 2022; the work engaged notions of labor and repetition through a multiplicity of gestural and corporeal interventions. Featured prominently on FORMA are the sound of bells—doorbells, meditative bowls, farm cowbells, Shinto bells—a motif CEM distills repeatedly onto the record to presage and work through both the violent specter of order and discipline, as well as the reparative qualities of harmony and retreat.

Opening the album with poignant synths, granulated bell hits, and double bass string drones is “The Calling”, which summons listeners into a rattling and twisting soundscape that dichotomously channels alertness and serenity at once. “Bells Corrupt”, in turn, transforms the comforting chime of bells into an alarming and insistent pattern as it evolves in pitch and form, recalling the anxious fi lm grammar of Italian giallo legends Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento or Czech animator Jan Švankmajer. “An Industrial Satire” is conceived as an homage to experimentalist Limpe Fuchs, known for her Dadaist use of self-made, metallic instruments and strings. The second part of the piece takes a staggering turn with the addition of ghaita—a Northern Moroccan double reed horn with a series of holes—sampled from the Master Musicians of Joujouka’s collaborative 1971 album with Brian Jones and layered alongside CEM’s own percussion work. The horn elements—linked to the ancient fertility rites of Pan—here culminate in a melodic embodiment of panic and celebration. “Statue Garden” is a minimalist organ drone piece interlaced with fi eld recordings accumulated through the musician’s recent travels across East Asia. Its dexterous balance of stillness and depth provides a contemplative interlude amidst the album’s vigour. The album closes on a provocative note with “The Sincerity Test” that features Berlin-based Lithuanian performance artist Gertrūda Gilytė, whose wry spoken-word intervention mirrors the kind of grotesque, deluded ‘positive affirmations’ that abounds on social media, suggesting a relatedness between narcissistic online speak and the rise of reactionary politics.

CEM is no stranger to the ever-threatening past and present of fascism, having been raised in Vienna within a Turkish-Kurdish immigrant household. FORMA thus emerges as a militant sonic offering and, through its razor-sharp interweaving of atmosphere and texture, conjures a fractured, albeit elegiac, space of possibility wherein time is out of joint and the circular motion of history with a capital H is dizzyingly thrown into disarray. As our world rushes forward into the past, casting dissonant spells might turn out to be our last rempart.