In 1958 Guy Debord defined the dérive as an exploration where participants “let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” The Situationist International’s co-founder was developing a radical yet playful way of experiencing time and place. A strategy for unearthing unique ambiances by untethering from clock and grid to find contours not depicted on any map. Even if it meant spending a day sitting in a Paris train station.
CS + Kreme’s records dérive through sound rather than space. Stylistically porous, the Melbourne-based duo, Sam Karmel and Conrad Standish, blur borders by taking in tropes of everything from jazz to club music and rendering their genre markers pliable. Their music is so captivating because they have a knack of transmitting ludic energy. Successfully broadcasting their playful space to us listeners where other artists might hoard all the fun for themselves.
The butterfly drinks the tears of the tortoise is a bucolic twist in the pair’s catalogue compared to the soul-ambient fusions of their early EPs, or the fourth world lounge-dub of 2022’s Orange. A folky-base keeps reappearing throughout the record, and it makes their more discombobulating explorations of rhythm and timbre hit stronger than ever.
Opener ‘Corey’s’ pastoral scene of acoustic guitar and gentle vocals has peculiar concrete sounds smeared around the edges. A juxtaposition that prevents the track settling into any neatly defined idiom. Closer ‘COTU’ verges close to Current 93 terrain, but a whirl of sped up and slowed down vocals alongside other peculiar sonics, including Teguh Permana’s tarawangsa playing, also take it somewhere totally different to David Tibet and co.
Their toying with ambiances and contours truly takes off in the record’s central tracks. ‘Master of Disguise’ features Yuki Nakagawa’s cello howling and wallowing over intricate beats and a sinister synth motif. The ominous mood continues into ‘A Single Grain of Sand’ but the setting changes completely, sci-fi coded sounds swapped for early-music melodies. These two extremes congeal on ‘Blue Joe’, a jovial folk melody turned uncanny by sliced and re-pitched voices. From there comes ‘Uki’, drum machines and synth bass locked into a squiggly groove which simultaneously evokes the Shadow Ring and White Noise without sounding jarring for a moment.
For Debord, the dérive was more complex than taking a stroll. It wasn’t about chance – a point he stressed to distinguish situationist practice from what he considered surrealism’s baggy excess. It was about openness and active investigation rather than simply drifting. This distinction resonates with what makes CS + Kreme’s new record so compelling. They travel through varied terrain, but they do something more sophisticated than haphazardly bolting their references together. The butterfly drinks… succeeds because it paints new contours onto familiar territory.
