(this is the May, 1997 edition of my regular article for City ReVolt magazine. Because this isn't the actual magazine, some of the shit talking and sarcastic bullshit might not make sense.)
Industry Standard by Aaron Johnston
Some reader email has opened a forum for clarification. 1. This column is not called "industrial standard" (reading is fundamental). 2. This column is no longer about industrial music. Don’t worry, we solicited a nice girl (no, not off the street) to appease all of your machine music needs. She’ll be debuting next month. If you can’t wait, read my Genocyber column in Alternative Press (plug). 3. Don’t send email asking if any good "rave jungle" will get reviewed. If I wanted to scribe about chest-level drum and bass, I’d write liner notes for Alex Reece. 4. This column will always cover emerging new music and leftist creativity. To receive a copy of our "mission statement," please send five cents (pennies only) to "the only magazine crouched low enough to offer a street level view of San Jose culture and arts." Don’t worry, the mailman will know where to deliver it.
Now, on with the new music! Hot on the heels of Incursions in Illbient, Asphodel Records has dropped As Is, the solo expulsion of Crooklyn Dub Consortium member, We. What this record lacks in solid identity, it more than makes up for with a compound of well-developed split-personalities. Don’t struggle categorizing this mess, it should fit neatly between the avant-garde jungle rack and the dub cut-out bin. Coming from NYC certainly has its cultural advantages, and We’s amalgam of echo chamber trip-hopoholica and groove-impregnated back-alley trance is proof. If Mad Professor is ever commissioned to dubomize a Tricky CD, sampling this would make for short work.
Soulless jungle. No term better describes Panacea’s latest Force Inc. offering Low Profile Darkness. This unforgiving discharge of corpulent bass, sadistic sampling and machine-gun rhythm programming gets my vote for skullfuck of the year. I’m not sure which is worse, listening to Panacea or having your head submerged in a sink full of bile while your Merzbow records are force-fed to the garbage disposal. Low profile darkness? Shite. This is about as covert as an abscessed boil oozing at the tip of your nose. The butcher of BPM? The berzerker of breakbeat? Call him what you will, but this guy has "nightmare jungle" down to a mad science. If tracks like "Tron RMX" represent the future of drum and bass, I’m buying a helmet.
Mick Harris, the master of English lazybeat, has cranked his malformed white boy rhythms into junglistic hyperspace for Sub Rosa’s latest drum and bass platter, Overload Lady. Syncopated beats, aurally reconstituted samples, mashed sashes of whiplash and deadening low-end fill this concrete burrito to a teeth cracking 56 minute whole. Beyond the pummeling, the crafty layering of hara-kiri inducing isolationist sounds that flow miserably beneath the surface torrent provides great fodder for deep headphone listening. Just imagine Mick’s more recent works as Scorn, but with the sound of a car accident spastically looped over the top.
While being far from jungle, Muslimgauze’s "Occupied Territories" (Staalplaat) is also noteworthy. Yes, as odd as it may seem, even Bryn Jones’ solo Arabic percussion project is sucking-off the nourishing electronica tit. These remixes by Panasonic, Drome, Zion Train, Clika and zoviet*france--to name but a few--splinter Bryn’s original works in every known direction of the electronic world. From stoner-approved dub and club-sanctioned trance, to somber blobs of reprocessed hand drumming and intangible soundtrack loops, no conceivable ground is left barren.
Call them industrial by association, but the artists featured on Subconscious Communication’s Paradigm Shift compilation are anything but black-clad hacks cracking the same old rivethead jokes. Skinny Puppy, Download, Doubting Thomas and The Tear Gaden are old-shroud with the lunch box posse, but this compilation serves to enlighten the ghouly masses by exposing the more experimental aspects of their work. These artists’ texturing of rhythm and displacement of found sounds matches the artistry of junglists, but there isn’t a broken beat to be found. Sure it’s dark and spooky, but there’s more than one way to skin a black cat and this CD will make you groove while you do it. The more techno-centric works by Kone, aDuck, Philth and Plateau aren’t to be taken lightly, either. Forgive my impotent omnipotence, but if this CD isn’t the best thing going, nothing is.