Posts Tagged ‘dark’

North Vänern Appreciation Society – the moment multibillionaires realise that their money could be better spent helping humanity on Earth

Posted: 9 October 2023 in Albums
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Dret Skivor – 1st September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

This twenty-two-minute continuous composition is ‘A consideration and contemplation of the stupidity of people who have more money they could ever spend and fritter it away on dick-waving projects instead of paying the tax they should be paying and contributing to society’, adding ‘Billionaires shouldn’t exist at all and we need to start having this conversation.’

Yes. Yes. And yes. It’s been something I’ve been silently raging and experiencing existential agony over in recent months. During the summer, half the planet was on fire. Meanwhile, tax-avoiding billionaires were jetting off into space and planning cage fights to settle the argument of who’s the bigger testosterone-fuelled egotistic manchild.

August saw Oregon flooded following hurricane Hillary and a billion-dollar plus restoration project in its wake: the same week, Virgin Galactic was jetting people into space for fun at a cost of around half a million dollars a ticket. If the ticket fees had been put towards the recovery operation, they’d be well on the way. But these cunts just don’t care. Fuck the plebs in their flooded homes: they’ve all got multiple penthouses well above sea level and they’ve earned their jollies – through the labour of the people who have so little, and some who have even lost everything.

I suffer corpuscle-busting rage at people who jet off on skiing holidays bemoaning the lack of snow. They’re one of the primary reasons there is no snow. How fucking hard is it to grasp? And if cars and planes are heavy polluters, launching rockets is off the scale. Not that they give a fuck. They’ll be dead before the earth becomes inhospitable to human life, and their hellspawn will have all the money and can go and live on Mars, so everything’s fine in their megarich world.

It begins with a grand organ note, as if heralding the arrival of a bride or clergy…and so it continues. On… and on. Five minutes in, and very little has changed. Perhaps some light pedal tweaks , a shift in the air as the trilling drone continues, but nothing discernible. The note hangs and hovers. It fills the air, with the graceful, grand tone that is unique to the organ, a truly magnificent instrument – and I write that with no innuendo intended, no reference to the Marquid de Sade submerged for my personal amusement here.

Admittedly, I had initially anticipated something which would more directly articulate my frothing fury at the fucked-up state of the world, but begin to breathe and relax into this rather mellow soundtrack… I start to think that this abstract backdrop is the salve I need to bring my blood pressure down, and think that perhaps this is the unexpected purpose of this release… but by the ten-minute mark, I find myself bathed in a cathedral of noise, and before long, it’s built to a cacophonous reverb-heavy blast which sounds like an entire city collapsing in slow-motion. And this builds, and builds. Fuck. I’m tense again. I feel the pressure building in my chest, the tension in my shoulders and back aches. It makes sense. This is the real point of this recording. Everything is fine until you log onto social media or read the news, and you see the state of things. Momentarily, you can forget just how fucking terrible everything is, how the world is ruined and how there is no escape from the dismalness of everything, and how capitalism has driven so much of this, creating a life stealing hell for those who aren’t in the minuscule minority.

Fact: 1.1% of the population hold almost 50% of the global wealth. A further 39% of wealth is held by just 11% of the population. 55% of the world’s population hold just 1.3% of the wealth between them. So remind me, how is capitalism working for the world? Trickle-down economics is simply a lie as the wealthy retain their wealth and simply grow it. Liz Truss may think that the UK importing cheese is ‘a disgrace’, but this statistic is mind-blowing.

Eighteen minutes in and my mind is blown, too. It feels like it could be part of the soundtrack to Threads. It’s a dense, obliterative sound, a blowtorch on a global scale, the sound not of mere destination, but ultimate annihilation. It seems fitting, given the future we likely face.

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Modern Technology – Conditions of Worth

Posted: 4 October 2023 in Albums
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Human Worth – 13th October 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

From the moment Modern Technology blasted in with their eponymous debut EP, simultaneously launching the Human Worth label, it was clear that they were special. The duo made the most fucking incredible, low-slung, dense mean-ass noise going. The lyrics were social, political, and sharp, paired down to stark one-line declarations dissecting with absolute precision the fucked-up situation in which we find ourselves. And with a percentage of proceeds of every Human Worth release going to charity, they’ve put their money where their mouth is. It’s not done in some crass, virtue-signalling way: this is their model, and they just get on and do it. And through Human Worth they’ve released some – no, many – absolutely incredible records, rapidly establishing HW as purveyors of quality product with a keen ear for quality noise. In an increasingly fragmented and challenging musical market, the trick for any label is to find a niche and excel within it. And that’s precisely what these guys have done.

And all the while, as a band, Modern Technology just get better and better. Any concerns that they had said all they had to say following the EP and debut album Service Provider (as if there ever were any!) are allayed with the arrival of Conditions of Worth.

Lead single ‘Dead Air’ opens it up with dense, grinding anguish. Chris Clarke’s bass and vocals seem to have got heavier. Then again, so does Owen Gildersleeve’s drumming. But it’s more than just brutal abrasion. In the mid-track breakdown, things go clean and the tension in that picked bass note is enough to spasm the muscles and clench the brain. It’s brutal start to a brutal album.

‘Lurid Machines’ begins in a squall of feedback and wracked, anguished vocals, and it’s harrowing, the sound of pain. The lyrics are comparatively abstract, and all the more powerful for it. Written out in all block caps, they’re in your face but wide open to interpretation and elicit the conjuring of mental images:

WHY ARE THEY SO ALONE?

THE LIES THEY ALL SHARE

LET GO

INSIDE NOTHING GLOWS

BENEATH A SHADOWED PHONE

The drums and bass crawl in and grind out a low, slow dirge, Clarke’s vocals are down in the mix and you feel yourself being dragged into a chasm of darkness.

These are harrowing times, and if the pandemic seemed like a living nightmare, it seems it was only the preface. The ‘new normal’ is not the utopia some commentators suggested it may be. For a moment, it looked as though we would achieve the golden goal of the work/life balance, that we may abandon the commute and save hours a week for ourselves and slash our carbon emissions in the process. But no. Fuck that. Get back to the office, tough shit that fuel prices are rocketing and bollocks to the anxiety you developed in lockdown and bollocks to the environment because power trumps everything. Government power, corporate power, media power… we are all fucked and have no hope of breaking this. And this is the backdrop to Conditions of Worth.

They pick up the pace and start ‘Salvation’ with an uncharacteristically uptempo stoner rock vibe, but around the midpoint they flip things, slowing the pace and opening up towering cathedrals of sound as a backdrop to painting a stark depiction of life on earth.

WIDESPREAD

FAMINE

WIDESPREAD

CONFLICT

WIDESPREAD

PANIC

WIDESPREAD

SHADOW

The song ends with just a spare, fragile but earthy bass that calls to mind Neurosis and Kowloon walled City. It’s this loamy, organic texture which defines the altogether more minimal ‘The Space Between’, the first of the album’s two longer pieces, with the second being the ten-minute title track. It’s here that their evolution is perhaps most evident, as they stretch the parameters of their compositions to forge such megalithic works and really push the limits of their two-piece arrangement. In contrast, there’s the super-concise ‘Fully Detached’, , and the last track, ‘ Believieer’, which are absolute hardcore ragers, clocking in with short running times, the former just making a minute and fourteen seconds. And the variety on display here only adds to the album’s impact. While each track hits hard, the overall impact is obliterating.

They crank up the volume and the shades of distortion in the explosive choruses of ‘Lane Control’ – because you can never have too many effects when it comes to bass played like guitar and blasting screaming noise to articulate feelings, and as for the title track… it’s an absolute beast, with heavy hints of latter-day Killing Joke in the mix as they flay mercilessly at a pulverising riff. The noise builds and the vocals sink beneath it all and you’re left feeling dazed.

But more than that, there’s something about the production on Conditions of Worth that’s deeply affecting. There’s a skull-crushing sonic density, but also simultaneously, remarkable separation and sonic clarity. These elements only make it his harder.

Conditions of Worth is more than just heavy. It leaves you feeling hollowed out, drained, weak. This is life, and this album is the perfect articulation.

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GLDN – Harmful If Swallowed

Posted: 16 September 2023 in Singles and EPs
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8th September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

GLDN – the vehicle for the one and only Nicholas Golden – blasts in by way of a return after a few fallow months with a single – his sixth – in the form of ‘Harmful If Swallowed’, taken from the upcoming remastered and expanded deluxe edition of their first release, First Blood. There was a lot of blood then, and moving forward, this new offering is less gore-centric, but is somehow yet more disturbing. This may just be a personal response – but then, what response is there to anything artistic in its nature – but I tend to be more unsettled by the psychological than the visceral. I mean, in real life, blood makes me feel nauseous and faint, but ultimately, I ca n handle it, but headfucks, they’re harder to handle.

Tripped-out piano provides the initial disorientating backdrop. Of course it does: GLDN’s domain is the dark and unsettling, and his cues stem in no small part from Nine Inch Nails’ magnum opus The Downward Spiral, the point at which Trent Reznor really found his stride in terms of nuanced composition and dynamics beyond harsh and soft, loud and quiet, but expanded his emotional range and sonic texture.

‘Harmful If Swallowed’ is well-studied, then, but it’s more than mere appropriation. This is one of those songs that’s dark, dense, and menacing, rather than overtly abrasive and aggressive, and the twisted, tangled emotions it explores are introspective and desolate but interwoven with a sense of underlying tension which hints at the turning of tables.

Two-thirds in, things take a turn for the heavy with a chugging crashing in as flames erupt and the darkness and crushing sense of apocalypse take over.

Stylistically in visual terms, GLDN is equal parts Reznor and Manson, striking and disturbing in equal measure. In the accompanying video, GLDN goes full Jekyll and Hyde. The Reznor GLDN crawls, naked, skin peeling, hunched and traumatised, flipping to thee sneering, croaking Manson GLDN who is the demonic supreme master.

GLDN continues to test, tease, and challenge, both musically and presentationally, and ‘Harmful If Swallowed’ is strong and progressive on all fronts.

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Watch: ‘Further In Evil’ by Marthe

Posted: 13 September 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Further In Evil is the debut full length from one-woman metal band, Marthe, which is due via Southern Lord on October 20th. An atmospheric and aggressive blend of punk, Further In Evil is a shift in gears from her musical background in the anarcho-punk scene and inspired by riot grrrl, crust and d-beat. The lyrics are full of rage and the music is full of strength; it has the power of Bathory and the sadness of Tiamat, tinged with the stench of Amebix.

Marthe is, at heart, a solo bedroom project— born out of introversion and a desire to explore new horizons and landscapes alone.  “Around 2012, I started feeling the need to express myself in a heavier and more atmospheric way,” explains Marzia, the woman behind the Marthe project. “I coincidentally started hiking more and more… getting closer to lonely soundscapes: my life, feelings and moods started being more introspective and introverted.” She continues, “Marthe suddenly became my comfort zone, my therapy, my shadow of loneliness, my book of truths, my mirror, my alter ego. Locking the door and disappearing in darkness recording music alone became something so powerful… I probably never really met myself before that.”

Further In Evil was composed and demoed over the course of a year during drives or hikes and, fatefully, the first look at the album – its title track – showcases the grandeur of Marthe’s surroundings.  Self-filmed and edited between Italy and Iceland, the "Further In Evil" video boasts the beauty of nature contrasted by Marthe’s devastating sounds.

Southern Lord have today unveiled a video for the snarling blackened title track, and it’s a monster. Watch it here:

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Photo credit: Silvia Polmonari

Kadaitcha – Tramontane

Posted: 9 September 2023 in Albums
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ant-zen – 16th September 2023

Christopher Nosnbor

Four years on from Tar, Ukrainian industrial duo Kadaitcha, consisting of Andrii Kozhukhar and Yurii Samson, have overcome many, many challenges to deliver album number five, in the form of Tramontane.

The tracks which appeared on their limited lathe-cut single last year do not appear here, and this is admirable: singles so often tend to be used as launchpads for albums, and it was particularly common in the 80s and 90s that albums would sell on the basis of a couple of singles, but would have next to no other decent tracks. In the days before streaming, this was something that was easy to get away with, since the only way of hearing the album was by buying it, which you would do based on the singles. But then, the risk could be reduced by taking punts using your half price or free options through Britanna Music, or similar. The advent of streaming hasn’t really improved things, though, because now, at least in mainstream circles, the album is essentially obsolete.

But outside the mainstream, the album is thriving, and artists are pushing the format now that the constraints and limitations of physical formats aren’t necessarily dictatorial in determining duration, and there are infinite options for exploration. The single wasn’t so much of a stop-gap release as a standalone document of a period in time. But the key point here is that Tramontane is very much an album, and a work to be approached as such. The notes which accompany the release are almost hallucinatory – not quite Burroughs cut-ups, but fragmented, non-linear, and they serve to articulate the essence of the music contained here. Stylistically, it’s tight and cogent, and there’s a flow to it, too, which begins with the appropriately-titled ‘Intro’, which is precisely that – a short instrumental intro piece which paves the way for the ten heavyweight cuts which follow. But within that coherence, what Tramontane offers is a work which really goes all-out to disrupt and unsettle.

‘Niello’ draws primarily on the sound and style of earlier industrial music, the electronic pioneers of the late 70s and early 80s, the likes of DAF and Cabaret Voltaire, but with its distorted, menacing vocals, there’s an element of the later evolutions of industrial which emerged in the mid 80s. It seems to be that there are very different understandings of industrial, and while Al Jourgensen may be a huge fan of William Burroughs and the music that formed the body of the first wave of Industrial music, namely Throbbing Gristle and also the wild tape loop works of Foetus and the heavy percussion of Test Dept, it’s industrial metal and harsh post-NIN electronica which have come to become synonymous with industrial latterly.

On Tramontane, Kadaitcha have brought the two forms, old and new, together, and the result is discordant, noisy, difficult. And these are its selling points. It feels like a guided tour through the most challenging aspects of Industrial music through its evolution and history.

‘Knife’ is a sparse, oppressive low-end throb pinned down by a dull, thudding, muffled-sounding beat, over which twitching electrical streams flash and flow while monotone vocals are unsettlingly detached. The percussion really dominates on the tempestuous ‘Liars’ and any and all references to Einstürzende Neubauten are entirely appropriate. It’s a thunderous, dense racket where the low end really stands to the fore, but it’s tame in comparison to the dark ‘Offering’: even when it drives out as a heavy and insistent bass riff, it feels unfinished, undercomposed. Yet therein lies its success: it feels organic, and nothing is overdone.

The mangled noise and droning distorted vocal on ‘Fossil’ is pure Throbbing Gristle, a barrelling barrage of blitzkrieg laser synth bleeps and a whole mess of midrange and lower end distortion and dirt, churning, discordant, the monotone vocals almost buried in the tempest of overloading unpleasantness, and ‘Seeds’ is similarly unpleasant and uncomfortable, everything going all out on overdrive.

It all comes together on ‘Insight’: beginning as a gentle, spacious, mellow post-rock guitar-led piece, it soon erupts into a mess of overload akin to Metal Machine Music, only with drums and sinister vocals. It’s got the lot, and as the album enters its final stages, it seems to consolidate the elements of the previous tracks to punch even harder, with the percussion harder, the grinding morass denser and darker.

Perhaps a reflection of the circumstances in which it was created, perhaps a reflection of the times in the world at large, Tramontane is heavy and at times harrowing. The lyrics may not be decipherable for the most part, but the mood requires no translation or interpretation, and Tramontane will crush your soul.

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Watch: ‘Flesh it Out’ by Proteins Of Magic

Posted: 1 September 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Operating in the same dark and subversive corners where Fever Ray, Jenny Hval or Bjork may find solace, ‘Flesh it Out’ is a track that arrives shrouded in a mystique all its own, with a strident confidence to defy conventions.

Written while gazing into the flickering flames of an open fire in her current base of Nashville, Proteins of Magic found herself caught in the daze of a flashback in which she had seen a young couple openly having sex during the day on the beach in Aotearoa / New Zealand. As Kelly Steven AKA Proteins of Magic remembers:

“The hope and the idealism, the youthful sheen on their skin, being unaware of what life lies ahead for them. That is what triggered the start of the lyrical process. I think the song lays out an emotionally treacherous life for them, a day in the life spanning 10 years and 2min52 seconds.”

Surrounding surrealistic lyrics with hex-like incantations, tribal rhythms, sinister synthesiser trills, and haunting woodwind sections, PoM creates an unsettling ambience and intimidating presence to send shivers. “If I give you a smile will you resuscitate me?” she coos through gritted teeth. Building to a hypnotic climax, ‘Flesh It Out’ couples brooding instrumentals with a litany of foreboding vocal textures, each representing a disjointed voice of differing lost souls. Foreshadowing a bleak future, these spectres emerge to erode the wide eyed innocence of youth and replace it with existential questions and hollow false promises.

As its title may suggest, ‘Flesh It Out’ was born from within a jam to evoke a spirit that is discernibly raw and immediate, before being layered and moulded repeatedly to find its current recorded form. The finished song spawns, regenerates and severs over its three-minute course, summoning a sense of self determination out of the chaos.

Directed by Ranger Garrett, ‘Flesh It Out’ arrives with an art-house style official video intended to capture a ‘day in the life’ in Nashville. Showing another side of the fluorescent glitz and glamour of the music city, it was shot around various alternative landmarks using a vintage Sony PMW-F3 and Sony Handycam DCR-SX45, including footage of the Dragon Park that was featured in Harmony Korine’s Gummo.

“I liked the idea of it being lo-fi and raw, and I wanted the filming to be like the recording process,” says Kelly of the video. “Less formulated. The cameras were actually literally held together with tape and things were falling apart. I wanted it to be a ‘day in the life’ in Nashville, in a manic, irregular, fractured way.”

Watch the video here:

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Credit: Chris Cuffaro

Listen: ‘Purgatory’ by State of the Union

Posted: 15 August 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Electro-Industrial band, State Of The Union has unveiled their latest single release, ‘Purgatory’.

‘Purgatory’ is a song that explores the topic of suicide. As human beings, we go through the ‘ups’ and ‘downs’. Some of us have a harder time than others dealing with these emotions. Some of us can even get to the brink of suicide because we want to make it end as fast as we can.

In esoteric belief, a person who commits suicide disrupts their karmic flow and goes to a timeless place where one second could feel like a million years! This is very hard to comprehend within our own minds. To experience something like that, we have to have an out-of-body experience and travel to a very low-frequency dimension known as purgatory.

In some religions, purgatory is known as the place where spirits go to pay for their sins and burn karma before they move on to their next life experience. All in all, we will never know unless we go there. That’s why it is better to keep making powerful electronic music that makes club-goers dance their nights away to songs like ‘Purgatory.’

Listen here:

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Watch: ‘Bad Machine’ by Soda Blonde

Posted: 14 August 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Irish indie favorites Soda Blonde are delighted to reveal the music video for their latest single ‘Bad Machine’, the first from the band’s upcoming Dream Big album, due for release on September 8th.

‘Bad Machine’ fuses warm vocals with fuzzy synths, bringing a sense of sonic pleasure with its self-acceptance message. Indie pop and vibrant electronica combine to create a song with vigour and excitement.

When discussing the single’s new music video, guitarist Adam O’Regan writes: “For this video we wanted to explore the idea of ‘malfunction’. In an age of increasing automation, artificial intelligence etc, it’s easy to imagine the many ways things could go awry. But also, we just wanted to break stuff! Our talented & hardworking production designers built the set in 2 days, and we destroyed it in 10 mins of 16mm film.”

Soda Blonde has grown tremendously in the years since their debut, and it shows. Whereas 2021’s Small Talk was an anxiety-fuelled coming-of-age record about navigating our twenties, Dream Big is a mature awakening to the world at large; one that dives deeper and hits harder than its predecessor.

Dream Big is as much a product of self-reflective reckoning as it is one of submission, and both of these experiences are borne out in its songs. Soda Blonde begins Dream Big by asking what they’re willing to sacrifice in order to achieve their dreams, and as the album continues, they wrestle with the sheer weight of that question.

Watch the video for ‘Bad Machine’ here:

Tour dates below:

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Listen: ‘Distractions’ by Miss FD

Posted: 7 August 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Electro-Industrial music producer Miss FD has just released her latest electrifying single, ‘Distractions’. The track showcases a combination of dark, pulsating instrumentals, and sinister female vocals.

‘Distractions’ envelops listeners in a dystopian realm, where glitchy electronic textures intertwine with gritty industrial elements to create an immersive cyber industrial undercurrent. The turbulent fusion of atmospheric soundscapes, aggressive beats, and haunting melodies sets the stage for lyrics inviting listeners to question and reflect on the constant bombardment of distractions thrown at us, keeping us from truly grasping the rapidly evolving events taking place in the world around us.

‘Distractions’ is out now through Quantum Release Records, available worldwide on all major streaming outlets.

Listen here:

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Miss FD is an underground dark electronic music artist, singer, songwriter, producer, and performer. The project began in 2009 and has since captivated audiences from the dark music world with a unique combination of haunting yet upbeat music, thoughtful lyrics, and mysterious and sensual vocals.

Miss FD released her debut single ‘Together Forever’ in 2009 to positive reception. This was swiftly followed-up in 2010 with her seminal debut album Monsters in the Industry. Her original style focused on electro-industrial, dark synthpop, and darkwave related genres. From 2010 to 2017, Miss FD went on to release a string of singles including ‘Love Magic’, Down in the Dungeon’, ‘Infatuated’, ‘Cry For You (Haunted)’, ‘Unraveling’, and ‘Electropop Sickle’. She also released two more albums, 2011’s Love Never Dies and 2013’s Comfort for the Desolate.

2018 saw Miss FD combine all her musical prowess over the years for her definitive industrial-rock album “Transcendence”. “Transcendence” also included a collaboration with Vulture Culture, whom she would further collaborate with on the singles ‘Ashes Of Stars’, ‘Spitfire’, and ‘Faster Than Light’.

Following her 2020 singles ‘Keep Going’ and ‘Pandemic 2020’, Miss FD released her three-song EP “Adore”, and the single ‘Your Core’, which were heavily infused with futuristic and cyberpunk elements. 2022 saw Miss FD exploring Göbekli Tepe in her three-song dark pop EP, “As Above, So Below”, followed by her cyberpunk single ‘Menticide’. 2023 brings the release of Miss FD’s latest cyber-industrial single ‘Distractions’.

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Slighter – The Futile Engine

Posted: 6 August 2023 in Albums
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Brutal Resonance / Confusion Inc. –21st July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

One thing I find – often – is that I keep encountering acts who have been going for quite literally decades without my having the slightest knowledge of their existence. This is a source of frustration: after all, I like to think I not only have my ear to the ground – so to speak – when it comes to emerging artists, but that I am pretty well connected with labels and PR. But then, so much of the music industry, it seems, is about luck and change encounters, and being at the right place at the right time. That, and the fact that existing in underground circles for a decade or more doesn’t mean that the chance of rising up toward the light is anywhere near remotely assured.

And so it is that I have been blissfully unaware of Slighter – the solo moniker of Colin C., who it appears, according to the bio, ‘has been fine-tuning the future of electronic music since kickstarting his music in Mid City Los Angeles in the early 2000s… Creating from a unique vantage point, he was involved in collaborations for various Metropolis Records releases and Cleopatra Records compilations, in addition to Slighter releases via his own Confusion Inc. imprint.’

‘How?’ I ask myself, and again, ‘how?’ I’m not only a fan and follower of these labels, but frequently get sent releases for review. I’ve mentioned perhaps a few times now – or more – how Cleopatra tapes were an integral part of my introduction to goth, and subsequently, Metropolis have been the outlet for some of my favourite more industrial-leaning acta like PIG, who I’ve been a fan of since they supported Nine Inch Nails on The Downward Spiral tour back in 1994. It might have wiped me bang in the middle of my A-Level exams, but fuck, the trip to Wolverhampton was worth it.

This is apposite. It seems almost impossible to discuss anything in the bracket of contemporary industrial without recourse to either Niner Inch Nails or Ministry, depending on whether the music is of an electronic or metal persuasion. It wasn’t always this way: from the 70s and through the 80s, industrial was a different beast, but circa 88 or thereabouts, something happened. It’s hard to really pinpoint what that something was, but it definitely happened.

And so it is that Slighter’s latest, The Futile Engine, is some strong work, which sits in the post-NIN industrial bracket, while owning a certain debt to 80s Wax Trax!. ‘Introspection Illusion’ announces its arrival with a squall of noise, a scream of electronica, and some muffled, subterranean vocal whisperings which are dark and unsettling… and then the machinery grinds into action and things really get heavy, and in no time we’re submerged in a throbbing barrage of noise, driven by a thudding industrial disco beat.

‘Pulling Me Under’ is more obvious brooding industrial dance with whirling synths and mangled, menacing vocals pitched against pounding beats. This sets the tone for the album as a whole: ‘Have No Fear’ is dark and sparse, a mechanised beat pulsating in the background against menacing close-mic vocals and we’re deep in PHM terrain here. In contrast, ‘Nostalgia Hysteria’ launches headlong into trance territory, tweaking the 505 in a full-on Josh Wink style.

They plunge deep into dark waters with the more experimental ‘Memory Corruptor’, but so much of The Futile Engine is simply dance music with some darker edges that it’s hard to really engage with. And the trouble I have with so much dance music is that it feels cold, clinical, impersonal. Perhaps it was the lack of drugs that mean I never got 90s rave or techno. But this doesn’t gain more appeal with time, and that’s a fact.

The Futile Engine has its moments, for sure, its execution is pure perfection, and the album displays a knack for insistent beats… but it’s exhausting. Unless you’re seeking relentless beat torture, you probably won’t dig this.

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