CEL (Felix Kubin & Hubert Zemler)

CEL is the joint project of the Hamburg-based, boundary-breaking, jack-of-all-trades Felix Kubin and the Warsaw-based superdrummer and human-and-music mediator Hubert Zemler. That might sound exaggerated, but in view of their debut album, released in 2020 via Bureau B, the duo really deserves it. Over the course of seven tracks, the musicians let influences from early electronic music meet a penchant for Berlin School aesthetics, underpinned with sparse industrial and/or krautrock grooves and a refined sense of minimalism, sometimes beckoning towards the dancefloor. Who could survive a collision like this without even a scab, if not the two greatest in their respective fields? In CEL’s music, the art lies in the small stuff: tiny modulations, barely perceptible shifts, transformations carried out almost subconsciously.