Reeko – La Metamorfosis Pt. 2

Coinciding with the one hundredth anniversary of one of the most surprising works by contemporary icon Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis, 1915), Reeko celebrates the renowned adult fairy tale with his own reinterpretation of Kafka’s controversial narration. The author offers a first person account of the protagonist Gregor Samsa’s amazing transmutation; a human just like any other, with a grey, predictable and routine existence. However, this bland existence comes to an end when Gregor undergoes a metamorphosis that transforms him into an insect. It’s this mutation that Reeko describes beat by beat, giving us Samsa’s every single heartbeat and shudder. We bear witness to his dehumanisation and we feel every trace of humanity dissolve into the cold blood of the new being that is coming to life: an insect man. This is a new circumstance that will affect the way he sees the reality he thought he knew and also the world that seemed to him rigid and unchangeable.

Juan Rico has already demonstrated his capacity for description with his trademark use of dark sounds, both digital and analogue, as he has become a master of both worlds. His sublime double LP, Finding the New Matter (Mental Disorder, 2011), took us to new and exciting places and established him as a reputed artist within the international electronic music scene.

A1, “Capítulo 4”. We find Gregor surprisingly accepting of his new reality. He’s far from going crazy and has serenely discovered in his new self everything he didn’t know and couldn’t perceive as a human being. “Capítulo 4” is an incredibly precise description of the awakening of the new Gregor. Shadows, fog and sinuous silhouettes that are impossible to identify. The only word that can describe it is confusion.

B1, “Capítulo 5”. The vertigo starts to ease. We can hardly feel the anguish and the heartbeat is gone. We are in a new reality and although it seems a done deal, every movement he makes tells Gregor that understanding this new world and his perception of it will not be easy. Chapter 5 demands our everything while we listen: our full dedication and attention to the last minute details that reveal a new horizon and its new colour, or lack thereof it. A horizon that, nevertheless, is more perceptible to Gregor because he can now capture all sorts of colours and emanations.

B2, “Capítulo 6”. Light. Gregor still ignores the fact that most domestic insects have a strong aversion to intense light as his human conscience is still intact. That said, it is to take him a long time to reprogramme certain habits, instincts and automatic behaviours such as his growing preference for lit environments. The painfully intense sensation that his antennae convey to his tiny brain when faced with light is an effective path to learning: little shocks that Reeko reproduces in this track, surrounded by an oscillating and changing ambience that redefines itself each time we listen to it.

We manage to stand up, little by little, with great pain. Nothing has changed around us, but nothing is the same either. Our perception is different. The metamorphosis, the intense sonic battle we have lost in Chapter 3, is an avenue to a new life. A cold and invertebrate life, but free from the chains of the sickly heartbeat that tethered us to that false warmth when we were mere humans. Where will this new phase of our existence take us and how will we survive as insects from now on?