My first exposure to Li Chao's long-running project "from the filthy concrete cave of smoggy Beijing" was 2022's Misbegotten Ballads (SVBKULT) and that album's unique collision of grimy, junkyard-style "early industrial" sounds and playful weirdness left quite a deep impression on me. This latest album is not exactly a proper follow up, as it is a collection of material created between 2016 and 2020 that "nearly faded into oblivion" in the dark early days of the pandemic, but those orphaned pieces have now "been reborn with the strongest wishes" and Chao considers them to be among his "most cherished works." Happily, I can now cherish them too, as Chao's single-minded pursuit of a curdled and corroded vision frequently yields fascinating and singular results.
There is not a hell of a lot of information available about Zaliva-D, but the project has been active for roughly two decades now and is ostensibly a husband/wife duo. Notably, the band's other member (Aisin-Gioro Yuanjin) seems to exclusively handle the video art side of the pair's live performances, so Zaliva-D albums are essentially a Li Chao solo project. In the past, Chao has dabbled in dark ambient and black metal and darkness remains a prominent theme in Zaliva-D as well, but the darkness in Zaliva-D's case feels more like a killer basement show in the burnt-out ruins of a post-apocalyptic city.
Rhythm is truly the beating heart of the Zaliva-D sound and Chao is something of a sorcerer at whipping up killer grooves that sound like they originated from little more than a broken drum machine and some scavenged scrap metal. In reality, Chao wields an arsenal of vintage synths and samplers, but few artists misuse their gear as ingeniously as he does, as just about everything feels distorted, detuned, played at the wrong speed, chopped up, strangled, and/or caked with grime and rust. That said, Chao's vision goes a lot deeper than just a mere passion for ugly, distressed, and decayed sounds. These songs are all pared down to the barest possible essentials needed to execute their lurching, trance-inducing, and ritualistic-sounding grooves, as the melodic component is rarely more than a simple synth pattern, a frayed and distorted traditional music loop, a snatch of nasal-sounding singing, or something that sounds like an air raid siren (or even two dueling air raid sirens in the case of "Coast to Coast").
Given that, the success of any individual song is almost entirely dependent on the strength or character of the groove. In general, Chao is quite fond of opening with a deceptively leaden, lurching, stumbling, or thudding beat, but it invariably transforms into something more fluid or complexly polyrhythmic once he drops in whatever trick he had waiting up his sleeve. In the opening "Deadlights," for example, brooding ambiance unexpectedly blossoms into a wonderfully rolling and unhinged-sounding climax of clattering hand-percussion and squirming and viscous-sounding synth swoops. In fact, just about every piece on the album features a similarly cool twist of some kind, but the most interesting twist of all is that Chao seems to exist in a world in which beat-driven music stopped evolving sometime in the early '80s: Total Withered sounds like the work of someone who fucking loved early hip-hop and Cabaret Voltaire, but checked out right before techno and '90s hip-hop completely rewired our collective rhythmic consciousness.
In lesser hands, such a willfully regressive approach would have only niche appeal, but Chao has managed to create a lumbering Frankenstein's monster that eats Throbbing Gristle, Nonesuch Explorer LPs, and Rashad Becker-style nightmare synth bestiaries and spits out something that sounds like it could be a lost underground tape classic from an iconoclastic sampling prodigy (or at least a dramatically less caffeinated version of Container). My personal favorite pieces tend to fall near the end of the album (especially "Eye-Flowers" and "Long Whine Long Promise"), but Chao's overall vision and anarchic bag of tricks are more compelling than any individual song. I have no idea if this is my favorite Zaliva-D album, as competition is somewhat fierce in that regard, but this dispatch from the vault can easily hold its own against anything else in Chao's discography and keeps his impressive hot streak alive in decisive fashion.
