Mother-Unit
Brain Massage

First of all, you have to imagine.

Imagine an enormous backdrop of black velvet, as large as only the universe can be, dotted with the distant glimmer of stars long dead of old age, whose light hasn't ceased yet to travel through space and time.
Imagine planets a thousand times larger than Earth slowly spinning on their axes, solar systems collapsing, provocative celestial bodies strutting through galaxies, showing off their curves.

That will be the stage for our show.

We will tell of armies armed against each other, flocks of spaceships as big as cities, impossible to count. And we will speak of millions of colorful spies being born and dying in the dark. Of little jazz club orchestras of hyperspace where rich career processors find themselves exchanging a couple of terabytes of chat after a hard day's work.
There will be stories of thermonuclear explosions. And of silence.

And now, try to understand.

"Brain Massage" ('10) is the debut album of Mother-Unit, the solo project of Bertus Fridael, former guitarist of the never too celebrated/mourned 35007: four tracks, for over 40 minutes of instrumental space rock, celebrating the carnal union between the sweat of distortions and the antiseptic composure of cybernetics, the smooth brilliance of plasma-welded steel and the coarse-grained sandpaper of guitars.

It's an album that adds practically nothing to what was already showcased by 35007 in the period immediately preceding the instrumental shift: it reprises the sound architectures, the kosmo(legs)hallucinated atmospheres, the bass-guitar-drums loops from hypnosis sessions, the stoner-oriented riffs mixed with interstellar cargos of synths, hammonds, and effects.
Upon close listening, it leaves transparent reflections of already admired explosions in your eyes and dust of meteorites long cooled under your nails. Maybe due to the way it re-proposes/recycles certain trademarks of Loose, or due to the predictability of certain solutions, or again, due to the lesser care of the sounds.

Then, however, at 4:45 of the opener "Birth - Faith - Death", something happens more or less that I had been waiting for since I knew 35007 had disbanded: something explodes between your ears, and it's as if, from the ledge of a building, a spaceship started screaming at the entire universe that it had decided to end it all. As if an android ballerina were dancing on pointe to the sound of a million clubs broken by a horde of cavemen.

This is, more or less, what I want you to understand.
I was waiting for an album that I knew would never arrive. I found myself with an album that, at least in part, fills the void that Loose had left.
And, simply, I don't care if it's not a masterpiece.