KHOMPA releases darkly-hypnotic boundary-pushing drum-triggered ‘Tre Trigger Contro Tre Trigger’

Davide Compagnoni, aka ‘KHOMPA’, has been pushing musical boundaries since the release of his ground-breaking debut album, The Shape of Drums to Come in 2016, featuring an adventurous mix of drumming, electronics and cutting-edge drum triggering technology. The album, featured on Ableton Live and Modern Drummer, introduced this unique audiovisual live project, whose main elements are: a drummer, a conventional drum kit, 3 state-of-the-art drum sensors, a laptop and a stepsequencer. Each drum controls a virtual musical instrument (synthesizers, samplers, arpeggiators, etc.) within Ableton Live music software that, in combination with a custom stepsequencer developed with MaxforLive app, allows Davide to perform real melodies/electronic orchestration without the use of any backing track. 100% live. In addition to that, he also uses a microphone set up in the middle of the drumkit to capture the dynamics of the acoustic drums and translate them through ‘envelope followers’ into electronic parts in several ways.

KHOMPA’s second album, Perceive Reality, which followed in 2022, saw the further integration of audio and visual components, with AI-generated 3D visuals created by Riccardo Franco-Loiri (alias Akasha) all triggered and modulated live from the drumkit.

Tre Trigger Contro Tre Trigger is a companion piece to Perceive Reality, drawing on the same technology but venturing into a more trance-inducing territory, with oscillating synths snaking around a pulsating, primal drumbeat, rising in pitch to a cathartic peak.

The video for ‘Tre Trigger Contro Tre Trigger’ is a 100% live performance where all the sounds and visuals were triggered in real time with KHOMPA’s drum kit as a reflection of the punk/chaotic/hypnotic energy of the song. The piece is also the closing track of the live performance “Perceive Reality A/V” that the artist is currently playing in festivals, cinemas and clubs in Italy. In the video, words that seem to be extracted from a manifesto of perceptual dissociation bounce off the screen activated and distorted by the drum kit itself.

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