Water and wine or oil and water? It swishes around—each artist has at least one very strong, very memorable track, but swallowed whole, all the ingredients of Instant Satisfunction blend tastily.
Four-way split between dark beat acts Rioteer, Urbanfailure, Gotharman and Axiomid available in three different formats, including a spiffy round metal box. Smart stuff from the get-go, starting with the talon-dragging guitar of Gotharman’s prescient “The Storm is Coming” and a sweet Mama Cass sample machine-gunned full of holes by Rioteer on “From Better Times.”
Since all four acts (three Slovak and one Dutch, if not mistaken) come at you in bursts and all a-tangle, it can take some time to sort the bodies out, although Rioteer seems to favour the most rapidly-firing beats, with irregular ambient excursions as contrast. As his name would suggest, Urbanfailure is the dystopist of the quartet—track titles include “Decay Ready” and “Progress to Decline.” Jerryrigging broken machinery, he telegraphs repetitive messages of distress before they have a chance to break down for good. Gotharman’s tracks are squidgy and screwy and buzzy, video game soundboards over which someone poured a sugary soft drink. His “BloodChain” sounds like a wacky remix of The Residents. Axiomid offers fragmentary, baroque scenic collages, bad newsreels from the last war and the new war on its way. In the midst of all the shouting, his relatively unassuming “On Attack!” is soberly insidious.
Water and wine or oil and water? It swishes around—each artist has at least one very strong, very memorable track, but swallowed whole, all the ingredients of Instant Satisfunction blend tastily.
Instant Satisfunction is available on Urbsounds. [Release page]
