Khompa – The Shape of Drums to Come

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An instrumental drum album like no other…

Released through Monotreme Records on 12 August 2016 and reviewed by now-drumming-in-his-sleep Stephen Brophy

Khompa is the name for a relatively new instrumental drum project and a very interesting one at that. Effectively it’s a one man-machine: Davide Compagnoni, a drummer with a conventional drum kit and an interesting trigger system with 4 drums controlling various virtual instruments that creates a very electronic sounding landscape. And it’s an album that’s far from easy to pigeonhole…

Albums like this don’t pop up too often. It’s refreshing, different and, yes, it’s very unusual in many ways, but it really is difficult to keep an album like this flowing without every track meshing into each other, lots of tempo changes and different sounds from the triggered synths help to add depth to the tracks. The power, the tempo-variations and the different textures that Compagnoni creates are multi-layered and overlap in a way that it’s very hard to believe that it’s not a band creating the music.

Tracks like ‘Nettle Empire’ are really impressive, with the triggered synth acting almost as a bass, the additional accompaniment bringing an almost steel band sound to a thumping backbeat, with rhythms building layer on layer as we go along. The instrumental tag could be argued against as ‘Upside-Down World’ features an almost spoken-word rap from Bo Nigen’s Taigen Kawabe, but it’s different and again fits in so well with the whole vibe of the album and against other stand out tracks such as the slightly manic ‘Louder’ and ‘Shape’.

An interesting thrill ride, if you are prepared to open your mind a little this is a perfect piece to wrap your ears around. Generally, I tend to stick to rock, blues and metal, but it’s great to expand your horizons every now and then and Khompa have certainly done that with The Shape Of Drums To Come.

Khompa – The Shape of Drums to Come8 out of 10

Track list:

  1. Nettle Empire
  2. Religion
  3. The Shape
  4. Louder
  5. Upside-Down World
  6. Make The Operator More Productive
  7. A.C.
  8. Wrong Time Wrong Place