Shattered Knives

Shattered Knives is an electronic music duo consisting of Mexican artist Carlos Flores and Romanian sound artist Alexandru Trendler. When the two met at the Conservatory in the harsh city called The Hague, the strong bond was formed based on the shared affinity for heavy, distorted sounds and altered states of consciousness.

Both artists are active through their individual projects, sharing a similar background in punk and metal. A former member of punk and black metal bands, Carlos Flores is now working under the moniker Visions Of Lizard, where he translates his penchant for noise and distortion into a vortex of saturated abstractions and industrial rhythms to manifest desolate and decadent landscapes. As Ash Everywhere, Alexandru Trendler weaves his recent experiments in electroacoustic music with the metal-punk heritage of his teenage years. He also holds a monthly podcast on the Lithuanian radio Palanga Street Radio called Burnt Offerings, as a tribute to Rozz Williams.

Their complementary approaches to sound and atmosphere come together in a stunningly disturbing way on their mix for Secret Thirteen as Shattered Knives. They chose Ketamine as the drug to set the mood for this mix since it best embodies the proverbial void that characterizes their music taste and lifestyle.

Through hour-long duration and more than forty tracks, this mix features a truly impressive selection of artists, from rare finds or lesser known classics to the bold and unexpected combinations of tracks. All these elements result in a hallucinatory sense of displacement, where nothing is quite as it seems. Haunting ambient minimalism of Deathprod’s „Treetop Drive 1“ sets the stage for lingering build up to Pact Infernal’s ominous industrial beats of „Infernality“, which progress into painfully slowed down „Uranokemia“ by Pan Sonic. Shattered Knives play with long periods of unresolved tension, most often brought on by glitchy, noisy sound experiments such as Yves de Mey’s Grey Branches, or pulsing surrealism of artists like Potter Natalizia Zen. This sense of hazy bewilderment is dispensed either with short moments of melancholic reflection through warped snippets from black metal projects like Hacavitz or Urfaust or developed into propulsive mania through equally warped industrial, darkwave or left field electronics. What holds this mix exquisitely together is Shattered Knives’ uncanny ability to find common denominators between entirely different artists, continuously developing extremely dark and murky atmosphere with sparse moments of ease.

In the records

Shattered Knives on the mix

The anaesthetic, hallucinogenic and dissociative effects of Ketamine – also known in some circles as ”psychedelic heroin” – were used as inspiration for this mix.
At the same time dopey and trippy, the mood is sculpted using many small layers that are sometimes processed with the usual electronic music tools such as reverb, delay, and transposition. The tracks are often transposed downwards so that the sound would mimic the dissociative experience of listening to music on Ketamine. The track selection blends our unreleased material with some all-time personal favourites plus some tracks that went under-the-radar in the last couple of years. Spiral-like, going in and out of the hole, crossing the same point at different degrees, the void becomes deeper and deeper while the self is being expunged by shadowy waves of different magnitudes. There was never a way out, just the final surrender of the body to cease the experience of the warped hollowness.