TRACKLIST

1. No Brakes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4:22  2. You Are Mine . . . . . . . . . . . . .5:08  3. Yesterdays . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5:09  4. Mingi. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3:13  5. Nefertiti Dub. . . . . . . . . . . . .4:50  6. Interlude (Mating Song Of The 808) . .1:40  7. Two Hammers. . . . . . . . . . . . . .3:20  8. Hungry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3:35  9. Raining Glass. . . . . . . . . . . . .4:21 10. Tornado Sirens . . . . . . . . . . . .3:30 11. Arapahoe County Sunset . . . . . . . .2:06

"This song’s about killing yourself, this song’s about depression, the women who leave. The car has no brakes and we’re flooring it. We’re gonna hit something - so what..."
A terse voice spitting out these words opens ‘No Brakes’, the first track on Valentine. With sampled/cut-up female vocals and gloomy piano, this almost sounds like a bad trip version of Moby. Cdatakill is one Zak Roberts, a breakcore producer comin’ atcha from Denver, Colorado, and Valentine is his third full-length album. However he seems to be mining a different seam from breakcore here - this album is heavy, dubbed-up, industrial and moody. His stated goal is: "to pin opposites together, to bring sounds that normally oppose and conflict with each other into a seamless aural nightmare and daydream, to expose and glorify the beautiful alongside the violent."
‘Yesterdays’ samples an old Billie Holliday song, framing the ghostly vocal samples in a paranoid atmosphere of sickening distorted beats and bowel-loosening bass pulses. I don’t think we’re in Jazzland anymore, Toto... A weird, sampled Middle Eastern-sounding woodwind melody snakes its way through the dark spaces of ‘Nefertiti Dub’, punctuated by violent, thick metal guitar stabs - this one wouldn’t sound out of place on Massive Attack’s Mezzanine.
Several tracks on this CD could cause serious damage on the dancefloors of those clubs whose patrons like their tunes dubby, dread-filled, queasy and f*cked-up. ~ by Ewan Burke

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. ~ by Tobias Fischer

SPOILER!

Exact Audio Copy V0.99 prebeta 4 from 23. January 2008 EAC extraction logfile from 5. September 2008, 22:30 Cdatakill / Valentine Used drive : MATSHITABD-MLT UJ-220S Adapter: 0 ID: 0 Read mode : Secure Utilize accurate stream : Yes Defeat audio cache : Yes Make use of C2 pointers : No Read offset correction : 102 Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes Used interface : Installed external ASPI interface Used output format : User Defined Encoder Selected bitrate : 1024 kBit/s Quality : High Add ID3 tag : No Command line compressor : C:\Program Files\Exact Audio Copy\wavpack.exe Additional command line options : -hmxd -w "GENRE=%m" -w "DATE=%y" -w "COMMENT=Released by a-one" %s %d TOC of the extracted CD Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector --------------------------------------------------------- 1 | 0:00.00 | 4:22.45 | 0 | 19694 2 | 4:22.45 | 5:08.37 | 19695 | 42831 3 | 9:31.07 | 5:09.20 | 42832 | 66026 4 | 14:40.27 | 3:13.29 | 66027 | 80530 5 | 17:53.56 | 4:50.14 | 80531 | 102294 6 | 22:43.70 | 1:40.08 | 102295 | 109802 7 | 24:24.03 | 3:20.38 | 109803 | 124840 8 | 27:44.41 | 3:35.42 | 124841 | 141007 9 | 31:20.08 | 4:21.64 | 141008 | 160646 10 | 35:41.72 | 3:30.40 | 160647 | 176436 11 | 39:12.37 | 2:06.43 | 176437 | 185929 Range status and errors Selected range Filename C:\Rips\Cdatakill - Valentine.wav Peak level 96.6 % Range quality 99.9 % Copy CRC 9A6AF30C Copy OK No errors occurred AccurateRip summary Track 1 not present in database Track 2 not present in database Track 3 not present in database Track 4 not present in database Track 5 not present in database Track 6 not present in database Track 7 not present in database Track 8 not present in database Track 9 not present in database Track 10 not present in database Track 11 not present in database None of the tracks are present in the AccurateRip database End of status report

SPOILER!

REM GENRE "Breakbeat, IDM, Trip Hop, Ambient" REM DATE 2006 REM DISCID 9A09AF0B REM COMMENT "ExactAudioCopy v0.99pb4" PERFORMER "Cdatakill" TITLE "Valentine" FILE "Cdatakill - Valentine.wv" WAVE TRACK 01 AUDIO TITLE "No Brakes" PERFORMER "Cdatakill" FLAGS DCP INDEX 01 00:00:00 TRACK 02 AUDIO TITLE "You Are Mine" PERFORMER "Cdatakill" FLAGS DCP INDEX 00 04:20:45 INDEX 01 04:22:45 TRACK 03 AUDIO TITLE "Yesterdays" PERFORMER "Cdatakill" FLAGS DCP INDEX 00 09:27:07 INDEX 01 09:31:07 TRACK 04 AUDIO TITLE "Mingi" PERFORMER "Cdatakill" FLAGS DCP INDEX 00 14:38:27 INDEX 01 14:40:27 TRACK 05 AUDIO TITLE "Nefertiti Dub" PERFORMER "Cdatakill" FLAGS DCP INDEX 00 17:51:56 INDEX 01 17:53:56 TRACK 06 AUDIO TITLE "Interlude (Mating Song of the 808)" PERFORMER "Cdatakill" FLAGS DCP INDEX 00 22:38:70 INDEX 01 22:43:70 TRACK 07 AUDIO TITLE "Two Hammers" PERFORMER "Cdatakill" FLAGS DCP INDEX 00 24:20:03 INDEX 01 24:24:03 TRACK 08 AUDIO TITLE "Hungry" PERFORMER "Cdatakill" FLAGS DCP INDEX 00 27:40:41 INDEX 01 27:44:41 TRACK 09 AUDIO TITLE "Raining Glass" PERFORMER "Cdatakill" FLAGS DCP INDEX 00 31:16:08 INDEX 01 31:20:08 TRACK 10 AUDIO TITLE "Tornado Sirens" PERFORMER "Cdatakill" FLAGS DCP INDEX 00 35:38:72 INDEX 01 35:41:72 TRACK 11 AUDIO TITLE "Arapahoe County Sunset" PERFORMER "Cdatakill" FLAGS DCP INDEX 00 39:07:37 INDEX 01 39:12:37