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Kareem, "The Sky Is Gone But You Are Still Here"
A lot of excellent music has come from the recent spate of noise musicians turning beat-ward, but there are a number of comparatively underappreciated and overlooked techno artists like Perc and Ancient Methods who have been producing similarly scary and crushing industrial dance music all along.  One of the best is Berlin's Kareem (Patrick Stottrop), who has reanimated his dormant Zhark Recordings label with this four-song salvo of bludgeoningly heavy beatscapes.  I am not sure that this is necessarily Kareem's finest release ever (people love Druids), but it is unquestionably a seriously strong contender.
Kareem's objective is instantly and admirably clear from the first seconds of The Sky Is Gone: get in; administer a thumping, hypnotically pulsing, no-frills pummeling; and then get out.  The opening title piece makes for an especially bracing, unambiguous statement of intent, as Stottrop weaves a vibrant, shifting percussive assault with nothing more than an omnipresent thump, some machine-like hum, some ping-pong-esque clattering, and a host of well-placed percussive flourishes.  Nothing even remotely melodic ever appears, but Kareem is so deft at adding and subtracting elements to the beat that it never becomes boring.  It also helps immensely that he knows when to stop−none of these four pieces ever drag or wear out their welcome and 25 minutes is an ideal length for such a focused, punishing, and unmusical aesthetic.
The remaining three songs hew very closely to the template laid out by the opener, offering up similarly machine-like variations on its unrelenting beat.  The following "Wildpitch, I Think I Love You," however, embellishes the formula a bit with some subtle late-song synth brooding to evoke images of a haunted factory.  "Divine Hunger" offers up its own small variations, submerging the bass drum, playing up the clattering ping-pong percussion, and enhancing it all with sputtering and crackling short-wave radio transmissions that call to mind an abandoned and remote military base.  The EP concludes with the slower, more skittering "Ligeria," which gradually adds breath-like industrial pulses to build into a slow-burning bit of dystopian sci-fi ominousness, resembling nothing less than the slow advancing of a vague mechanized horror.
If The Sky Is Gone can be said to have any flaws, they are entirely willful: there is not much here that Esplendor Geométrico was not doing 20 years ago and Kareem’s focus is unapologetically narrow.  In lesser hands, that would be fatal (or at least very dull), but Stottrop’s execution is perfect–these pieces work (and work beautifully) because they are lean, visceral, and assured.  Fans of artists like Container and the more beat-oriented side of the Hospital Productions milieu will not want to miss this.
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