A nice splash of exploratory electronics on this first LP from Beattie Cobell. A meld of surgical coldness with dirty analogues that comes across like a modern-day Throbbing Gristle eagerly eating into its rhythmic nihilism. Filling dimensionally light algorithmics with Reichian slips, euphoric juxt-a-posies and flirting undercurrents. Kinetic investigations creeping with interest.
track lines that continually unlock, push themselves out of their sequenced straitjackets
Treatment Works starts quite modestly with of the taut bounce’n’purrings of “Ball Game” doused in odd trumpet-like rasp and back-pedalling undertows. Then “Catford Dogs” takes your fancy, falling like an “AB/7A” cambelt of tinny loveliness, synchronization-slipping dualities in a scoopy percussive paste. Stitchy track lines that continually unlock, push themselves out of their sequenced straitjackets into tempo-boppin’ infinities. A taste for the unorthodox that the enveloping couriers and trillings of “Lee” reach further towards. A psychedelic witchy synthesis, replete with a nice oriental osci-twang, loose-changing the codex, notching along to liberal sprinklings of asymmetrical staples.
quite breathtakingly overwrought and poetically apocalyptic
“Smiths Harassment” is more concentrated, an alarm call mathematically at loggerheads with itself, hardcore(ing) Cluster-like custards marching to a hypno-tranced ratchet underwritten in dubby whirls. It’s very addictive, and after the short vibro-embryo of “Glo-Day” comes the best track of the album. A cheeky slap’n’tickle of grit-covered industry going by the name of “Blackheath Standard”, defo something you could imagine Mr P-Orridge having a wail of a time over, as it flays its skin to reveal something quite breathtakingly overwrought and poetically apocalyptic.
“Gate Clock” is another heady number, pawed over in delinquent processing, an attack/decay/sustain/release miscellany that sways plenty of warped dissonants and fly-papered horizons. Leaving “No Ball Games” to sign off in a cognitive ticker tape redux of the opener.
More, please, gentlemen.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
