“My Human Objective,” Spark says in the opening minutes of Super Robot Battle Deluxe, “is to make your ears scream.” A rising tone climbs so high that dogs in the neighborhood are whining in fear. I grind my teeth down to nubs, and I really, really, really want to be doing anything else than suffering through this freakin’ tone of death. Spark can’t do it just once, oh no, he comes back to it time and again during the opening track of his new record, just flogging the listener with this brain-engraving tone. The underlying beat structure and claustrophobic loop of melody (and how it turns itself into a shrieking spinning mass by the end of the track) is, however, decently engaging. Which is the only reason I even bother to get to the second track. “This album is well suited for extreme listening experiences,” the press releases warns –at the very bottom of the page. By the time I get that far, my ears are already bleeding. The gentle sine tones and distant brush of percussion of “Spectralk” is a welcome refuge from the noise terror of the opening track.
Spark is out to obliterate electronics on his newest record, adopting a live, performance-style approach to his knob twiddling and squelch blasting. It’s old-school improvisation against the digital backdrop, on-the-fly node splicing for optimal disjointedness and the persistent cicada rhythm of granular chaos. Tracks like “Space” with its buzz of attenuated air raid sirens and popping steam beats turn themselves inside out and become the thrashing chaos of breakbeat aggression (“Bombing For Peace”) before splintering into Dali-esque timepieces that rapidly tick themselves into oblivion and fuse into a drifting ambience that gives birth to emotionally arresting analog melodies (“Memor”).
“Sick to Death” squiggles with robotic voices driven into the DSP stratosphere while a virtual harpsichord charms its way out of a plastic bag. “Transform, Sonic Doom” tries to out-Devine Richard Devine with his endless layering of sound bytes and digital effects (and, somewhat surprisingly, it actually works pretty well as a combat piece). “Secret Science,” one of my favorites, welds deep space noises to an angular piano solo like a Keith Emerson composition for the 50th anniversary of Vangelis’ Cosmos soundtrack.
It’s a constantly shifting landscape out there in Super Robot Battle Deluxe as Spark puts a live wire into his creative muscles and lets his overloaded cortex drive his fingertips. Some of it works, some of it will be of interest only to those with a deep passion for the caustic precision of a thousand knives being sharpened simultaneously, and the rest will be heard with a curious fascination as to how these disparate elements could actually be combined into a listenable whole. Engaging, in the end.
Super Robot Battle Deluxe is out now on n5MD.
