I’ve been lucky to hear so much material by Todor Karakolev over the past five or six years that despite his apparent dislike for actually releasing music it’s been like every non-release has corresponded to a ‘period’, like Picasso. The blue period was those TDR experiments from ten years ago maybe, and it was also very blue when he played live for us at the Bastion reissue party. The rose period was undoubtedly Vikend, and maybe cubism was a mutant techno record which never saw the light of day last year.

But my first favourite tracks of his have been things like ‘Takva Devojka’, which had the grave sexiness of Depeche Mode mixed in with the perfumes of Skopje’s Bit Pazar, ‘Emish i Zarzavat’, similarly indebted to a zaboravi-Evropsko-vreme tradition, and later ‘Moeto Jas’, which re-hashed all the tropes of electroclash in a strangely atemporal way. And there’s been techno Todor, trap Todor, italo Todor…

And this little record now is like Todor has interiorised all these past tones, attitudes, experiences. And as always happens in these cases it’s actually a very bare and non-manneristic thing which holds its own beyond genres: it doesn’t really care what kind of record it is and so of course it’s a great record.

EP works like a palindrome whose order is greater than the sum of its parts. It starts and ends in the same place but not quite, and that place is a rarefied, forever-post-disco landscape which we enter the first time with ‘Не сакам да танцувам’, an adult and glamorous ballad of unrequited love.

The heart of the record is made up of two perfectly round songs of malaise, closer to the post-post-punk sensibility we expect from Todor but with some important twists. ‘Сите патишта’ is dark-humoured, ill, unhappy. Terribly modern but with the spell of an orthodox incantation, given by the unchanging bass over which Todor finds a new and better relationship to melody, interrupted only by a gong-sounding bell creating a strange empty space around it for our man to whisper into: ’cите патишта водат у курац…’. The tiny pearl ’Наивно’ is a hopelessly tender relationship song about impossible communication in an ocean of love, with the floating pads and distant kick and snare that give it a trap flavour that really suits the music and the musician.

In the record’s final throes we return to that soffuse place of lit-up floors, washed through all the social and sentimental anxiety accumulated across 20 silvery minutes. ‘Танцувам’ returns to the melody from ‘Не сакам да танцувам’ but more delicate this time, and as it obsessively, hypnotically repeats, Todor finally dances.

Flora Pitrolo (ACC Records / 5060)

released by 5060
5060.bandcamp.com