Lassigue Bendthaus
Cloned

THE REVIEW

Lassigue Bendthaus, aka His Cybernetic Majesty, Mr. Uwe Schmidt: a rather atypical, oblique, and intersecting character in the already sufficiently crowded electro scene (and beyond), both chronologically and electronically situated in the just-passed (so to speak) nineties.
Originally released by the Florentine Contempo (those were the days...) in 1992, then re-cloned about two years later by the European Electro/E.B.M. label par excellence, the Belgian KK, "Cloned" amazes and surpasses previous (and even future) Lassigue legacies with detached robotic visionary hysteria and as dazzling as truly chilling elevated quality.

Preceded by the phenomenal mini L.P. "Biohazard", released a few months prior also thanks to Contempo, the 10 "Cloned" sequences resume that exhilarating yet challenging cyber-path, first theorizing and then happily concretizing upon listening a remarkable, often stunning series of monolithic and one-titled sub-themes (five of them, as in the infamous vinyl b-side, are preceded by the prefix Re- as if they were improbable remixes): only a non-sequential prime number accompanied by an additional parenthesis determines their frigid, robotic pacing. Imaginative cyber transformations, based on the audio-recombination/mutation of the fractal-fragments substantiating the track itself. Sound/technologically a thousand light-years ahead compared to its chronological contemporaries, Lassigue Bendthaus skillfully generates (and infinitely clones) disfiguring, glittering, angular acoustic algorithms: sometimes concretized into dark shreds, stunning, whistling, composite pieces of the icest, (positively) obsessive, clouded, nervous, metaphorically Gibsonian (in a Neuromantic sense), electro/cyber-music produced in those years in dear (romantic) old Europe.

Degenerate and forward-thinking son of the electro (Man) Machine-intuition par excellence of Düsseldorf, Mr. Schmidt, crafts a work as (never gratuitously) challenging as it is flickeringly expressive: in "Cloned #7 (1)" it seems like listening to a future (un)proposable "Boing boom tschak" for the third millennium: semi-hidden heavily processed vocals beneath a thick layer of assorted heavy noise, dismantled and regenerated paroxysmally without interruption; numbing, saturated, digital percussionism at the edge of the cyber-pain threshold relentlessly thickens in "Re-Cloned #1 (4)" literally scarred by a "singing" dangerously akin to (un)pleasant noises from steelworks memory.
The only "approachable" and less clangorously industrial track is "Re-Cloned #1 (8)", a sort of mutant cyber/hip-hop: less relentless rhythmic structures and an unexpected underlying musicality, only tainted by a "subaqueous" singing, though still humanly recognizable.

Should the aliens or their robotic epigones ever decide to come down and snoop around the war-torn earth-shaped globe, they might find, among these microgrooves, something technologically and musically familiar.