Published by Alessandro Violante on January 8, 2017
Spanish musician Rafael Martinez Espinosa, known as Geistform, started making music released by the pioneering Dirk Ivens label Daft Records approximately in 2002, when his first album titled Uno was released and rhythmic noise music became a bit more known in the underground industrial scene. He could be considered a younger incarnation of Esplendor Geométrico, which are Spanish as well and broadly considered the true pioneers of that kind of distorted sound, although that of Geistform is quite different from theirs.
If his early sound was surely more influenced by Sonar and Dive, as well as by rough techno with a genuine early industrial attitude, when he joined Hands Productions in 2008 he started composing minimalist rhythmic noise-oriented ballets alternated to more IDM songs, which can be described using this definition: syncopated post-industrial ’70s-fashioned ballets for people living in the age of digital information overload, with titles and sounds recalling radio waves, transistors, sensors, semiconductors and radio telescopes (RATAN 600).
Things changed once again in 2015, when he released the techno industrial-influenced Tension EP, following a genre experiencing a new life recently, quite different from what released before. His new album, Transmitter, released on 14th October, four years after the very old school-sounding Data Transmission, is a mixture of two different sides of Geistform music: the first part of the album is more techno-oriented, while the second presents his classic old school sound. Songs like Gauss, Receptor and the aforementioned RATAN 600 are pure techno industrial episodes, filled with his sounds of choice. The strong four on the floor feeling is interrupted by the second part of the album, alternating more noisy episodes such as Coda 705, with its danceable rhythm and its noise atmosphere or the hard Semiconductor, a perfect dry mixture of his two main influences: IDM and techno. The opener Measurement has a danceable rhythm which plays with sound-waves generated by Rafael’s gear.
Geistform doesn’t have fear to change his style and in Transmitter he demonstrates how to be a mature and smart artist, with the understanding that repeating the same formula can be frustrating, although maybe this can be a problem for someone. Geistform is the demonstration that art is subjected to a natural transformation. Each song of Transmitter is a single fragment of the puzzle, perfect for the alternative dancefloor.
Label: Hands Productions
Rating: 8