Meshuggah
I

THE REVIEW

If one were to spend about twenty minutes in a workshop with their eyes closed and then listen to Meshuggah, they probably wouldn't find much of a difference.

I don't know if Andy Warhol would have ever liked Meshuggah, and moreover, I don't know if Meshuggah ever liked Andy Warhol, but with this album, it seems to me they've taken his so-called "machine-like snobbery" literally and pushed it to its extreme consequences.

If Warhol wanted to "become a machine," Meshuggah have come very close to fulfilling that wish, indeed, they sound like a machine.

It's very hard to believe that this EP was recorded on planet Earth, at least not the present one. Here, you can't just listen; you also have to strive to imagine, or rather, visualize.

If Warhol's work exposed, through a sort of exaggeration or hyperbole, the mutation process that society and life in the post-modern era were undergoing—deconstructing the image, cutting it, enlarging it, modifying it, amplifying it, and above all, reproducing it, serializing it, without a premise, goal, message, or circumstance—then Meshuggah have gone beyond, they've tried to conceive the outcome of such a process, they've mentally visited that world and brought us a slide from it.

The result seems plausible to me: mechanized chaos, exasperated synchronism, maniacal asepticism, structured and deconstructed noise and rumble, some unhealthy echoes coming from a desolate horizon, icy atonal melodies, and now and then the senseless screams of a madman ranting, admonishing, scolding, going insane. The only element—the voice—that suggests humanity, as if in the landscape of huge machinery, humanity, and with it all that is human, had almost vanished, tiny against the industrial gears like in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a marginal presence like in certain paintings by De Chirico.

It's music that sounds like the soundtrack of a reality where everything repeats and expands, the same yet different, being born and dying together, beyond alienation and beyond consumerism, a reality where the moment of production coincides with that of consumption, so much so that there's no more space for life: existence now become an assembly line. And unfortunately, it all sounds very current.