Jahtari label founder Disrupt has created a haven for all things dubular and dread-inflected, often bringing his own particular strand of science fictional elements to the fore on releases that reference a host of SF tropes from the interstellar planet-busting nihilism of Dark Star (sampled here, of course) to Blade Runner (memorably recreating Roy Batty’s final monologue using a range of heavily-effected speech synthesizers on “Love On” from 2009’s incredible chiptune’n’bass LP The Bass Has Left The Building) and beyond.
Dropping the dub levels way down low, Omega Station is at once an imaginary soundtrack – Disrupt suggests “twenty-third century library music” as a reference point – and fictional audio documentary of the titular space outpost’s decline and (perhaps) fall. Dropping the BPMs way down low, he lays out the groundwork in wheezing, ponderous rhythms that conjure the vastness of distance in the great out there in a series of highly ambient pieces that ooze atmosphere (hopefully not literally…) across the audio field and set the scene for the slow-burning drama that unfolds over two sides of vinyl.
The results are immersive and engrossing, whether listened to in the foreground (on headphones for the full experience) or background as the listener prefers. Omega Station provides a good way to replace the tedious quotidian grind of reality and replace it with something more intriguing, even for the surprisingly short timespan of just under half an hour. Something in the chirrup of sputtery electronics and the filtering flickers of dub delays works wonders on the perception of time while listening to this album, sweeping away the passage of minutes and transporting everything essential in the soundscape into Disrupt’s vision of things that might be to come, somewhere, sometime. The stereo spectrum is used to particularly eerie effect, as are timestretched voices and the ever-present tinkling of digital devices. The focus on the hiss and thump of the mechanical motion of the station and its denizens, human and artificial, finds gravitational pull in the lowering analogue bass that floats from the “Observation Deck” to the fibrous hydraulics of “The Growing Domes”, and as the story progresses, it outlines some kind of catastrophe whose parameters become increasingly unsettling as the album continues.However, this is no visceral adventure story like Aliens, no tale of rampant xenomorphs, militarised gunplay and massacre; instead, the subtleties are key to the tale of Omega Station and the ways in which the inhabitants seal their fate. The conclusion comes almost as a blessed relief from the gentle anxiety that Disrupt has created in a waft of synthesizer filter tweaks and a soupçon of rhythmic tension, and in the best tradition of multi-part interstellar narratives, hints at further episodes yet to come .
-Linus Tossio-
