Such relentless bludgeoning could easily hide sloppy thinking, but this troika inscribe enough detail to make it seem like scrolling commentary, a comedian’s aside or footnotes to furiously scribbled text.
A rat king of industrial beats and snarling bass. Enduser is San Franscisco’s Lynn Standafer, with whom I am familiar through a small but assertive amount of work with Submerged and Bill Laswell. The Teknoist and Needle Sharing come from Manchester and Nuremberg, respectively, and are new names to me, though both boast hefty enough discographies.
When done right, I find the mosaic complexity beneath the fierce demeanor of this dark drum’n’bass immensely satisfying. Brutal enough to tear down most anything in its way, it is actually the building up that makes this positive impression, which is why I find “breakcore” such a misnomer. Such relentless bludgeoning could easily hide sloppy thinking, but this troika inscribe enough detail to make it seem like scrolling commentary, a comedian’s aside or footnotes to furiously scribbled text. The likes of William Burroughs and the Devil provide further commentary.
The album begins by coming to a screeching halt before laying rubber with the Teknoist’s first onslaught (his third, “Jack It,” is probably my favorite). Each artist has provided the others with “pools of sound” into which to dive. All three are terrific at juxtaposing the raw and the cooked, the hellbent with a little breathing space. On “Walking Upside Down,” Enduser actually even wafts a breeze filled with a kind of longing. Ultimately, whose track is whose and who did what where is irrelevant because they all did it very right. Aside from a couple of lazy, misogynistic track titles.
Enduser Shares Needles with the Teknoist is available on Ad Noiseam. [Release page]
