Enduser
Run War

For those who, ten years ago, loved drum’n’bass and its expansive digressions into ambient territories, the rhythm addicts who raise an eyebrow with disdain at techstep and its monotonous derivative forms.

For those who don’t scream blasphemy when they hear Bjork’s otherworldly voice trapped in a transparent block of furious glitchcore.

For those who wade calmly in the torrential current of a gabber kick at 200 BPM.

For those who love the grimiest hip hop and enjoy style crossings, even if the product becomes a bastard with a skewed noise gaze and skin darkened by the hottest raggamuffin from Montego Bay.

For those who gaze into the abyss where the seismic shocks of an unimaginably deep bass activate the peristaltic reflexes, and they plunge in headfirst, unable to keep their legs still, here, for all these deviants, detritus of the club culture, transformed by nighttime highways, couch travelers, bass frequency sniffers, stationary internal dancers, emaciated athletes with dilated pupils, for them, Enduser crafts a pill with an unmistakably bitter taste, tailor-made for such cynical palates.

The influences this manipulator—née Lynn Landafer—cites are clearly the reference points to start from to get an idea of this work: KRS One, Photek, and Skinny Puppy. However, the breadth is such that a plethora of styles necessarily come into play, which is not easy to summarize. Drum’n’bass forms the backbone of every composition, and although to understand the coordinates one must go back to the golden era of this style (we’re talking about Roni Size and the WE of the masterpiece "As Is"), the rhythmic patterns are decidedly more brutal and frantic (Animals on Wheels might come to mind, but also Christoph de Babalon) and ready to explode into gabber gallops immediately maimed by cuts of white noise.

The ambient peeks in, and not from too far away, especially with dilations and interspersed moments that herald the (re)unleashing of sonic hell. On this substrate, vast quantities of sampled voices are laid. In fact, for an instrumental record, it’s quite sung. Rap and raggamuffin, as vocal styles, dominate, but there are also artists of crystalline purity (the aforementioned Bjork) or voices sped up and brutalized as in the apocalyptic Rohypnol Beats. Let’s say that after a few tracks you realize that the song structure is always the same, but this doesn’t detract much from a work that’s not about the mind, but about the legs. Contrary to many classic drum’n’bass productions, where the sounds are isolated and rarefied, here the thickness, the layering, is so dense with acoustic fragments that it imparts an exhausting and claustrophobic fullness to the whole, which, combined with frenetic rhythms and a fearless pace, outlines the contours of a challenging listen.

Compared to more famous breakcore productions like Boxcutter or Vex’d, the Enduser monster appears as an entity of furious brutality, absolutely distant from any compromise, and the fact that, in the end, it is precisely dance music only magnifies its value. Killah!