On another of Courier‘s delightful cassette releases, we find Cousin Sharky trading in “sub-dimensional bass street electronics”. Although this goes part way to describing the sound contained therin, there is something at times distant and ancient about some of the wide variety of moods and textures on offer on Re-Evaluation Of The Macro-Cellular Communication System.
The vocal groan, a beaten-down rhythm, the whine of hydraulics as if in some distant outpost, footsteps emerging from the murk; a vision of one of those exoskeletons that Ripley uses in Aliens springs to mind, but wandering lonely and ignored. Each blow feels like the end of something indefinable, and that continues with that anger of voices unleashed but behind closed doors; a robotic beat bubbling up with indignation. There are echoes of Nitzer Ebb, but slowed down and starved, and with track titles like “Synclastic Vibrational Correction”, you know that we are dealing with fat more metaphysical bearings.
The echoed voices of “Isolation Chamber” are more peaceful, churning over a laboured drone which is lulling in its hypnotic repetition. It continues unswervingly, drawing us closer to something — but to what? The hydraulic beat and agonised voices start side two; “Sub-dimensional Paradigm Shift” has echoes of Godflesh, with that kind of hefty might and swaggering definition. The voice is like a sawblade and the guitar swings and claws at the atmosphere as if trying to gut the sky. The bells that open the final piece, “Anti-calcification Procedure”, are faintly ecclesiastical but battling something underground. The voices are muffled and distended; and in the further distance, a means of escape is echoing, rattling just out of reach. That sense of unattainable movement resounds in the sorrow and despair of the voices as they try to bargain their exit, but to no avail.Re-Evaluation Of The Macro-Cellular Communication System is a curious and powerful work that draws on industrial music as much as it draws on isolationism, but always searching for some sort of unattainable peace. Well worth checking out — and as ever, the packaging is great.
-Mr Olivetti-
