- A quick Google search on "3:33" doesn't reveal much about the artists, anonymous as they wish to remain (although we do know they're associated with East Coast hip-hop group Parallel Thought, who've worked with Del The Funky Homosapien of Gorillaz fame among others). It does, however, unearth a curiously large number of anecdotes from people in various states of disturbance about the eerie recurrence of the time/number in their lives, with this phenomenon being the origin of both the band's name and the subversive darkness of this EP.
Similarly alternative is their use of musique concrète as a conceptual standpoint, with demolished breaks and real world sounds giving an impression of reality sans visual, and arriving somewhere around the gritty desolation of Amon Tobin or UNKLE's Psyence Fiction. They make a set of artistic objects, like a Rothko series perhaps. That is, they each take the same form—heavily distorted looped drum breaks drowning in layers of screaming atmospherics—but with differences. "333EP1," for example, has a haunting piano setting the tone, whereas the chimes in "333N5" feel like they're being rippled by the first winds of a hurricane, as a skin-crawling voice whispers just beyond immediate hearing.
Some people might find the lack of variation tedious, but they'd be missing the point—this is full-on immersion, and aside from the laudable agenda of revisiting a key paradigm in the development of electronic music, 3:33 have reminded us just how real said music can sound.
Tracklist01. 333N3
02. 333EP1
03. 333EP2
04. 333N5
05. 333N4
06. 333EP3
07. 333DIRT