- DREKKA -

What is Drekka? Who is Michael Anderson? Well, he's a musician. Some kind of modern folk singer in a way. Like americana complimented by street noise listened to in a reverb chamber. I don't know, maybe that's on the right track, at least to explain the music. He also runs BlueSanct, a label with a lot of heart. - Brian John Mitchell, QRD magazine

Q: - What's the most accurate description you've heard of Drekka?

Drekka: - My friend Thax Douglas, a noted poet in Chicago, once told me that he liked to listen to Drekka with the windows open in his small apartment which is right by a busy intersection. He liked how the music changed every time, depending on the time of day & amount of traffic outside. Another person told me at a show that he kept trying to concentrate on the show, but found himself staring at the ceiling thinking about something he hadn't ever thought about before. Both of those are nice descriptions.

from BROKEN FACE magazine, Sweden: "Take Care to Fall" is the long-awaited debut album from Michael Anderson AKA Drekka. Previous EPs and CD-Rs have all been promising in their own right, but none of them have been this rewarding. It's an opus of haunting beauty and disturbing menace, at times folky and lo-fi, at others ambient and industrial but at all times fractured, buzzing and distorted. Imagine the mad sonic sound sculptures that have made Nurse With Wound key suppliers (along with Omit) of soundtracks for nightmares and mix that with pastoral folk drones along the FSA axis and you'll at least partly grasp what sort of dark atmosphere Anderson is going for. In the echo-drenched "Silent Duty" we get to wade through a vapor of reverb before finding the melody, which once found proves to be a delicate lo-fi/folk song. At other times the songs are more direct, like "Fractured" which with its plucked acoustic guitar, carpet of deep ambient undertows and fem vocals surely must be meant for a place a lot more mystical than my living room. At first "Sickness Subsides" seems like formless abstraction, but then the most melancholic piano notes you can imagine appear in the middle of the quiet wall of noise like a ship finally finding its way through the thick fog into the safety of the harbor. Admittedly not everything here is as great, but when performed with this sort of honesty and pain I have no problems overlooking those brief moments. Strongly recommended for those of you who enjoy Coil and Nurse With Wound as much as FSA and Galbraith.