“A Day in the Life” is the first chapter of a dedicated series fully curated by English veteran Steve Bicknell for KR3, an Italian label founded in 2020 focusing on repetitive and hypnotizing techno music. The album is a philosophical journey that brings the listener into the cycle of everyday life. Everything in our life come and goes, like every day in our life it starts, finishes and starts again, being marked by the rhythm of night and day. This record is signed by two different aliases of Steve Bicknell: himself and The Evader, another side of him that is slightly darker and more melancholic, but without being less heavy.
The journey begins with an obscure ambient track, where a voice communicates to the listener a sense of tension and bewilderment, as a symbol of the condition that forces our lives into this deep state of repetitiveness. But we don’t have to be intimidated by this condition: the intro leads us in fact straight to the point. An energetic, hypnotic and heavy 4/4 rhythm with an incredibly curated sound design, which shows fully the skills of a profoundly talented and experienced producer. All the elements are kept together by a gloomy and noisy synth texture.
On Side B Steve Bicknell uses a more killer approach. It is a parallel rail to side A, but with even heavier sonorities. The music is still very hypnotic and focused on the 4/4 rhythm, but the sound is harder, rawer, faster and more impetuous. “A day in the life 5” (personally my favorite) is a dance floor oriented track with a ever-present dirty hi-hat sequence and a very special groove created by detuned wave shapes.
The last track closes the cycle of everyday life by taking us back to the starting point, revealing the philosophical spirit and message of the album. Life is made of contrasts: like the one between light and darkness, between good and evil, between joy and sadness. As Heraclitus stated, to know something is to know its absence. In this sense light is lack of darkness, evil is lack of good and so on. What this album and its beautiful music want to teach us is to take everything that is a burden to us and embrace it, and not to lose our point of view in the everyday life.
“A day in the life” is already available in both digital and vinyl formats on KR3’s Bandcamp page and in the main online stores, and some tracks have been premiered on “Artaphine” and “HATE”. Once again this label has been able to give us some really quality hypnotic music, and we will follow the next releases closely.
Bandcamp Link