Label: Domino Format: CDS,12″
“What Is It With You?” clicks into life with a flurry of timestretched rimshots, snare trills and attenuated vocal samples which really could have been disastrous in their religio-ethnodelic wavering, but aren’t in the least bit. In fact, this is such a shockingly sonorous trip into the Drum & Bass vault that it’s scary. Strings rise and fall, distended voices weave in and out of each other and the bass booms for all it’s worth, and when the gear shifts into storming snare attck mode, it’s almost too much to bear.
Third Eye Foundation‘s sound has previously tended towards the harsh and noisy, and while there’s the residue of this here, there’s also a highly-developed sense of sound design which has passed through the playful experimentation phase and progressed into something really stunning. The repeated sample of someone muttering “Jesus…” which highlights “Are You Still A Cliché (With Troubled Mind)” simultaneously gets the point across through the ritual dismemberment of sundry wailing divas and Churchy choirs while working the old but hard-to-pull off trick of getting a vocal to work as percussion. Add in the “Remote Viewer” version of the title track, and everything’s gone Ambient in an early Coilish manner (see “S Is For Sleep”), with all the Electro Isolationist implications that raises. Spectral without being Gothic, and all the better for it.
-Freq1C-
