Avraham Kober - D ORDR (2025)

To understand the logic and idiosyncrasies of D ORDR, it may be useful to look into the origins of its creator, Avraham Kober.


He is a non-conformist by nature in most aspects of his life, his art, and his person. But he is also a stubborn, obsessive, cigarette-guzzling beast, a charismatic, manipulative crook, a feral prodigy, a relentless animal, and a master of his craft if I ever met one. Ever since we accidentally met years ago, his unsettling presence has been haunting me like a demon lurking over a paralyzed sleeper.


Expressions of his main traits and maladies can be found in his art. His music doesn’t sound like anything else, and it makes some other examples of electronic music seem like cheap plastic - superficial, inanimate, lifeless. It is a wild, guttural, yet super-tight and highly refined type of synthetic music.


Most of the sounds in this album are digitally synthesized. All the brass- and wind-like instruments, the aggressively bowed cellos and double-basses; all the quacking, wailing creatures, the buzzing insects, the bottomless bass drums. Like physical modeling, the products of Avraham’s processes are synthetic artifacts of acoustic and physical likeness. But unlike physical modeling, the synthesist does not base his patches on physical models and mathematical equations but approaches the process in more speculative, subjective, perception-based manners. There is no attempt to precisely imitate any existing acoustic instruments, organisms, or mechanisms, but to create environments inhabited by possible, hypothetical instruments, organisms, and mechanisms. They are often distorted, enhanced, or augmented versions of their real-world counterparts.


Technically speaking, these behaviors and characteristics in synthesis can be accessed through experimentation with feedback and nonlinear elements in patches, amongst other functions such as chaotic LFOs, phase distortion, etc. Some of the pioneers of similar approaches to synthesis and signal processing include David Tudor, and later Rashad Becker and Tom Mudd, respectively.


Avraham creates some of the most life-like musical images through synthesis, but they are never naturalistic. They are always more than simply realistic. They go further, into physically impossible regions, sometimes into abstractions, while their source remains hidden, occulted. Due to their synthetic origin, they inherently allow these (im)possibilities, these new colors. For me, as a listener, notwithstanding my familiarity with his music, at times I experience a sort of a “perceptual shift” in my mind, where I am hanging between impressions known and unknown, familiar and uncanny.


Ultimately, the entities inhabiting his pieces, his environments, seem to compose the truly fictional, surreal, acoustically-inspired electronic music that synthesis asks us to make from the possibilities it affords. A new type of highly acousmatic music. A treatise on his approach to rhythm should be written in the future.


This release comes after years of creative battles and vast amounts of material. At 30 years old, after losing most of his projects, his patches, his tracks, in his 2023 Computer Crash, the composer is ready for his debut solo album. We used to grieve over the many patches and tracks lost in the Crash. But now it doesn’t seem to matter. For me, this collection of tracks fully represents this phase and aspect of Avraham’s work, and I thank God, Grischa Lichtenberger, dingn\dents, and every other poor soul involved, for helping him cross the barrier of releasing, and bringing this album to light.