R.E.E.L. – Music For Psychedelic Duelling

Zona Watusa

One of the many highlights of last year’s Delaware Road festival, the Somerset collective R.E.E.L. (Rapid Eye Electronics Ltd.) have got something here on Music For Psychedelic Duelling to graffiti over 2020’s gloom in the shape of two thirty-minute mutating stabs full of brawling pyrotechnics and toppling tautness.

It’s not long until those acid haus arpeggios of the start of the first side are overcome by radioactive witchery and ill-Tardis sonics. That hot-wired invocation that burns across it, evangelically pirated in noisy scar tissue (courtesy of Mr Glitch) that I swear sounds like a clever reappropriation of abortive canned laughter.

It’s a blindingly brilliant opener that only gets better as the tangling danceables jiver to Tusken raider / Wookie cries.
Suddenly, it hits a lovely rhythmic chop as its many strands collude, sonically spoon — then bang! — it’s flirting with the flavoursome. Slanted orientals and pulsating pallor as the gloopy Scooby Doo keylines backward glance and the fabric play-doughs some interesting elasticated action From the sidelines, a heliumed gnome repeats “I’d like to sell you some time”, sarcastically adding ‘ I understand you don’t have enough’.

Loving the way IX Tab’s esoteric narratives are all over this like intrusive thoughts you can’t shake free; thrown into that dirty drone concrete mixer or across those battered melodics, they work like odd directional arrows to the curves flow here — they inform, perturb, shimmer with occultist ooooh as they mechanise the chemical betweens. A tempo tweaked, twerked, the clambering Magnét-o-bones crow-feeting the glare like Clint Eastwood before the red rainbows flow. I’m not really a dance music fan (always found it too clean and chiselled for my liking), but these crookened couriers are really roasty, discoing off the scale in a satisfied wow.

But it’s the second side that really does it for me, an altogether darker and tension-filled prospect. Zzzzither cut, whirring around a pulsating spine like haunted plankton undershot by a cliff edging droooooooooone. The reverbed dialogue is shiver-shot, full of distorted miss-firings that drag in some divine siren moans.

A drawn out loveliness that holds you in its tightening aperture, lights your head with its inventiveness. There’s something of early Psychic TV to the jiver too about a martial beat or the Dreams Less Sweet moans of the quasi-religious, maybe; but it’s not wearing its influences too heavily, as vaselined punchbags and reverb springs invite in this strangulated IDM strangeness. The aerosoling areola radiating contaminated colour, the beats behind; which aren’t quite right at first, but soon loosen to dribble into this addictively mangled space-age that seals the deal in a dark-wave of jaded euphorics.

It may have taken over two years to get this baby to the public, but it’s been worth the wait. A satisfying sound that leaves you hungry for more.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-