A mathematically complex broken beat handmade out of beefy kicks, snares, and metallic rim hits drops in and immediately picks up speed like some vengeful entity as shrieks of siren and fragments of terrified voices float in from whatever hellworld of punishment this music must have come from.
An atmosphere of eerie anxiety is the first thing you notice, as the disembodied and pulverized whimpers haunting every track lull you away from safety. A mathematically complex broken beat handmade out of beefy kicks, snares, and metallic rim hits drops in and immediately picks up speed like some vengeful entity as shrieks of sirens and fragments of terrified voices float in from whatever hellworld of punishment this music must have come from. If the opener is the strangest dream, as the voices suggest, then the rest of the EP may be considered as having crossed the line into the realm of nightmares.
Nothing is reliable, you can never let down your guard. Part of the appeal of most techno lies in the certitude of a certain kind of repetition, which is difficult to find here. The suggestion even of a categorization like breakbeat suggests a certain rhythmic pattern of kick-kick-snare-cymbal-kick; but here beats are dropped out of certain measures or tripled in the next, skipping around like a record needle shuddering in an earthquake. In the distant background are borderline hungry squawking sounds of predation like the warnings of a race of beings evolved to live in a post-civilization ruin.
Brave listener, hear the haunted horns and tortured cries over a bottomless void and a baseline that somehow manages to be even more chaotic than the insanely creative and unpredictable drum programming, which consists often of furious gabber. No attempt is made here to tame techno music’s most deranged subgenre, and gabber drums fly at 175 bpm (it actually sounds like it could be even faster than that sometimes). Fat synth lines drop in over a haunting choral arrangement for a short moment of rest on this always surprising EP by Vancouver natives Minimal Violence. But then reverbed rave stabs swept up by a fury of drums remind you that this is, after all, a Tresor release and the club is definitely evoked. That they are a hardware outfit is evident (check out for example their excellent live set for Fact Mag), the elements of sound design shared between the tracks are clearly derived from carefully managed signal chains of distortion and hardware effects processing which contributes some sense of cohesion to an otherwise maniacal project. Have a listen, but keep the lights on and your prescription medications handy.
-Winston Mann
Link – Bandcamp
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