It is a sort of Bitches Brew updated to the '90s, the sound undertaken by K. Martin & J. Broadrick during the first Techno Animal releases. Long epileptic suites immersed in a dissonant electric magma, which mixes seemingly irreconcilable realities such as dub, world music, industrial, hip hop, ambient, and the classic 'free' scenarios already familiar to other projects of the two.
Just like the masterpiece of the electric shaman the sonic assault is divided into two discs, but each with a well-defined direction. Incessant dub tribalisms ("Mastodon Americanus"), rhythmic frescoes now close to hip hop with remnants of lobotomized funk ("Narco Agent vs The Medicine Man") now to the most disruptive industrial ("Demodex Invasion"), hallucinatory trumpet solos (here one expects an "a-la Jon Hassell" but it is none other than the legendary Jon playing in "Flight of the Hermaphrodite"), or even substrates of claustrophobic clusters and the constant presence of frenetic 303 acidisms inserting here and there, as if it were the electric piano of a Joe Zawinul, is what is found in disc one, named "Dream Machinery".
Closer to the previous "Ghosts", more droney and less industrial, disc two, "Heavy Lids": very slow and dilated tempos ("Needle Park"), deformed organic paranoias ("Evil Spirits", Angel Dust"), more marked experimentation on machines (imitations of didgeridoo, tapes, and assorted metallic noises as in the case of the masterpiece "Catatonia" and "Red Sea") and a grand finale, equally balanced between the long (21 minutes) and dark ambient stasis, style of early Robert Rich, of "Cape Canaveral", and the less cryptic one, which instead recalls Eno on acid, of the narcotic "Resuscitator".
Probably not the top of this great project, but still a must for those who loved the heavier derivations of the two (God, Godflesh, Ice, Jesu, The Curse Of The Golden Vampire...).
Tracklist and Videos
Loading comments slowly