Coil, Christoph De Babalon, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Converge, Wu-tang Clan, Scorn, The Dillinger Escape Plan, The Misfits, Skinny Puppy, Public Enemy, Edith Piaf, Nile, John Coltrane, Cypress Hill, Massive Attack, Slayer, Rakim, early Addict Records & Low Res releases + other midwest hardcore/breakcore, Jungle+Drum N Bass, early 80's Hardcore Punk, Dub, Industrial, etc, etc, etc.
Sounds Like
breakbeats :: atmospherics :: heavy bass :: bizarre, fucked-up sounds that frighten your neighbors
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Igloo Magazine review of Valentine: "Yet another reason to love the ever fascinating Ad Noiseam label is how the artists are allowed room to grow. Zak Roberts, a.k.a. Cdatakill, has made his name over the last few years by grinding up the breakcore scene (with two previous records on Ad Noiseam, as well as releases on Zhark, Low Res, and Eupholus) and yet, with Valentine, he’s jettisoned most of that furious staccato beat work for something truly elegant and beautiful. Diving deep into the trip-hop dub, Roberts’ Valentine is an evolutionary left turn that brings all manner of new life to moribund structures.
"You Are Mine," for example, is the best Muslimgauze track I’ve heard in several years. Really. It is creepy how Roberts has taken some of the Bryn Jones’ rhythms and timbres and built something so referential yet still so alien. The bass lines and the echo of dusty record grooves shimmer like early ’90s period Muslimgauze while the looping vocal track snaps the mood forward to some of Jones’ later experiments. If the rest of Valentine turned out to be nothing more than a tribute album, that would have been fine, but Roberts pauses here, lost in vibrant rhythms and dust-storm grit of the Middle East, for just a moment before spiralling off into other territories.
A ghost of Billie Holliday anchors "Yesterdays" in an juke joint opiate haze. Her voice is unraveled into a series of shivering echoes, a cascade of half-formed vowels that tumbles over slippery percussion and electrified synthesizer melodies. "No Brakes" opens with a nihilistic warning--"The car has no brakes and we’re flooring it; we’re going to hit something, and so what?"--before hurling itself into a howling haze of looping Persian vocals, phantasmal piano melodies, and dark-hop rhythms. "Nefertiti Dub" swirls with phantom reeds, a loop of woodwind melody that has been lost for many generations until it has been rediscovered by this gentle dub sandstorm. From somewhere else, the storm has collected the last performance of a string orchestra playing from the deck of a doomed river barge while the storm’s electrical discharges coalesce as spurts of metal guitar noise.
"Raining Glass" lumbers between elegant trip-hop and doom-laded dark-hop, with fine diamond melodies strewn in the lugubrious substrata stomp; while the distress signals of "Tornado Sirens" moan and writhe beneath a flickering strata of glassine percussion. The closer, "Arapahoe Country Sunset," is filled with the warped tones of a spaghetti western guitar (via Dead Hollywood Stars’ re-imagining of the cinematic western soundtrack) and a percussive chaos reminiscent of Winterkälte beating up Amon Tobin for his breaks. Roberts ends Valentine by wrapping a homage to the furious breakcore of his past around an atmospheric evocation of future possibilities.
Magnus Blomster’s original artwork references Audrey Beardsley’s gothic ethereality, and it encapsulates both the phantasmal delirium and the decadent distress of Cdatakill’s music. If Valentine is a love letter, then its intended recipient is the soul that believes in both angels and monsters, love and disaster, pain and redemption. Very highly recommended."
Textura Magazine review of Valentine: "That Zak Roberts’ Cdatakill sound defies easy categorization is one of its most appealing qualities and ultimately a testament to the uniqueness of Valentine’s sound. Apparently, there was formerly a pronounced breakcore dimension to Cdatakill’s sound but little trace of that remains on Valentine. Instead, Roberts opts for hazily textured and hallucinatory trip-hop and dub soundscapes haunted by anguished moans and scuzzy textures. The album’s eleven heavily distorted pieces sound like they’re being shredded and splintered into pieces by a gauzy screen as they make their way to the listener. Throughout the 41-minute disc, Roberts drenches the material with poisonous bass snarls, shape-shifting tribal breaks, and convulsive dub-clatter. Disoriented voices moan from the center of a violent vortex in “No Brakes” while “Nefertiti Dub,” pistol-whipped by a hugely distorted bass figure, spreads its macabre tentacles in all directions. In addition, knife-edged beats slip and slide in “Two Hammers” as female voices cast their diseased spell over the helpless listener. The album’s most arresting moment arrives with the jarring “Yesterdays,” not only an amazing listen in itself but one that assumes an even more astonishing character once one realizes it’s a Cdatakill cover of an infamous Billie Holiday torch song. Could that possibly be Lady Day’s voice, stretched and strangulated over a throbbing, nightmarish breakcore pulse? It certainly is, but it’s also merely one dizzying moment of many on Roberts’ provocative collection."
Tofaki.com review of Valentine: "Just like the universe, energy is infinite. It can not be destroyed, only transformed into a different state. This physical wisdom is a pretty good picture to explain to a die-hard breakcore fan, why the new album by genre-heroes Cdatakill still rocks superbly, despite being very different from anything they have done before and indeed a bit more “cultivated”. It is also a good metaphor for those without prior knowlegde of Zak Roberts’ one-man band to describe a style which manages to sound relaxed and aggravated at the same time. And finally, it goes some way in explaining the dense, paranoiac ambiance surrounding “Valentine”. The inner tension has to be released in some way or the other, after all, and even if, on the outside, the murderous, maniacal and mathematically precise rhythm-machinations of the double album affair “Paradise” (which placed the unpolished experiments of the “Brazilian Nightmare” release next to more recent studio cuts) or the more soundscape-oriented digital fieverdreams of “The cursed species” may have been replaced with downbeats, dub and dulcet atmospheres on more than one occasion, that doesn’t mean that there is not still a lot of severe damage to be done. “We’re gonna hit something – so what?” a determined voice intones at the beginning of the programatically entitled opener “No brakes” and truly, from then on it’s a slenderly timed and tightly corsetted 41 minute ride through Roberts’ weirdly-wired neuroreceptors. Everything was clean about his previous efforts -, the drums, the sounds, the samples all appeared to be cut with a nano-saw invented by Nasa to trim the nose-hairs of alien bacteria. Now, the ingredients are smeared across the canvas like the leftover from a psychedelic painting session looked at from behind thick sheets of Marihuana smoke. On “Mingi”, adventurously deep growling bass rolls melt into a wild animal’s roar, Billy Holiday’s “Yesterdays” disintegrates into a burning haze of echo-grooves and schizophrenic sound clouds and if a piece is called “You are mine”, then it’s not a tribute to love, but obsession. The focus is no longer just on the beats, but on the overall-feel of these strange-scenes dominated by the interaction between scraping metal and heavenly melodies made up of human voice-snippets. The erotic artwork courtesy of Magnus Blomster is a perfect visualisation of the music – raw, unashamed, provokingly physical, yet playful and full of sweet promises. It looks like Cdatakill have realised that the strongest statement may sometimes consist in switching to a different gear. While previous albums seemed to run so fast that they were out of breath by the end of the race, “Valentine” is so full of tension that it virtually brims with power. At times, it even seems as though Roberts has built the perpetuum mobile – not having spilt a single drop, it almost appears as if he actually increeased the total energy reserve of his system."
Record Label
Ad Noiseam | Low Res | Eupholus | Zhark | & others
"The name cdatakill means nothing, it's just a name. It's just how I refer to the music and noise i create. Sometimes I try to sound like the sky is caving in. I have a soft spot for those sorts of sounds. Sometimes I make art out of garbage and other times I make garbage out of art, this process keeps me entertained. I drag my ass around the planet to deafen myself and others, and I love it." - Zak Roberts
AD NOISEAM PRESS RELEASE 2007 “Cdatakill is Zak Roberts, a musician based in Denver, Colorado. The project started in the late 1990’s, on the ashes of Robert’s project under the name DJ Rabies. Ever since its inception, Cdatakill caught the attention of the breakcore and industrial scenes, and released several 12’’ released on Zhark International, Suburban Trash, Eupholus, Hardline Rekordingz and No Room For Talent, as well as tracks on compilations for DHR, Cross Fade Entertainment (Christoph de Babalon’s label), Irritant, Component Records or Dtrash.
“Paradise” was the first output on CD by Cdatakill. It features a whole new album (the first CD) and a re-release of “ Brazilian Nightmare “, an ambient album which had been released in 2002 on CDR by Eupholus. As a bonus, remixes by Jason Snell (Bombardier), Matt Demmon (Eupholus) and Stick have been added to this second CD. This album was a new direction for Cdatakill, moving from the very hard beats and broken structures (as his split releases with Abelcain or Low Entropy can testify), this new album displays more warmth and complexity,
“The Cursed Species”, Cdatakill’s second CD album, was released on Ad Noiseam in October 2004. A hard and mean album, this one takes the whole “rave is back” anthic and twists it in the Cdatakill way. Speaking of how old-school sounds and energy are reappearing on the front stage, Zak Roberts said “I wanted to reclaim them, make them mine, not leave them to happy hardcore”. No atmospheric tracks this time around, but a major effort in building coherent and complex tracks. He adds “I think my future tracks are going to be a lot more experimental, but this one had to be hard. And hard it is. Supported by numerous shows all over North America and Europe, including participation to many high profile festivals, “The Cursed Species” turned to be Cdatakill’s most successful album so far.
Two years were necessary to turn the page of the mean “The Cursed Species” and for Cdatakill to give birth to his most appraised CD so far, the calmer, warmer “Valentine”. Published by Ad Noiseam in the Autumn of 2006 to critical applause, this new full length album sees Zak Roberts moving away from the avalanche of hard breakbeats which had been associated with his name, and bring a very original mixture of dub sounds, heavy bass and hi-fi production, the whole thing enriched by Magnus Blomster’s remarkable artwork. Still dark, but a lot richer in sounds and textures, this album paved the way to Cdatakill’s second european tour and to a continuing praise from reviewers worlwide, including repeated airplay on the BBC’s Radio 1 music programs.” - Ad Noiseam
oh man! Valentine is an amazing work. deeply dark strong feeling and great elegant sounds.. much respect.. i have a remix of Cognac by Milanese now online.. thanks for your time, bless
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