A vacuum of distortion and drone draws air from lungs, horror pouring from blurred thump and fuzzed out fear.
Instruments of Discipline. If you’re wondering whether or not the name of the new sub-label from Love Blast is an indicator of what will follow let me tell you from the outset, it is. This is not going to be picnic electronics or music for the park, this is crushed carbon computer music. Lunar Lodge and Mai Mai Mai, of Yerevan Tapes fame, are the asylum keepers for the first installment, LL/MMM.
Now I know there’s a lot of talk about “dark Techno” and the like, but LL/MMM goes that step further. The Love Blast camp have always had a taste for mingling ambient abstraction with a drum machine, a sound they carve from onyx waveforms, and this latest EP is no exception. The occult orchestrated “Secrets” starts the eclipse. Haunting samples ruminate, looping half-audible chants spiral beneath a thick dust of distortion. Basslines bulge in 4/4, the only familiar comfort allowed in this Techno tomb. That luxury is stripped for “Silk”, sidelong clicks and clacks being the percussion partner. Punishment is the aim. Samples are once again employed, the human voice boiled down to distant grunts and groans. But the tormentor grows weary of toying. The mouth is clamped, the electrodes positioned. Voltage and electrical current pour through the track as a torrent of violence explodes.
You never know where you are throughout this EP, what blackened room these evil-eyed Italians will lead you into and what implements of suffering lie within. If the first two tracks, or tortures, are of both flesh and mind, the finale is purely mental. “Denial” is the audio equivalent of burial. A vacuum of distortion and drone draws air from lungs, horror pouring from blurred thump and fuzzed out fear.
Instruments of Discipline is tantamount to drowning. An ocean of disdain consumes all, a sea pulling the listener deeper and deeper into the cold and remorseless currents of LL/MMM. Styles bleed into one another, genres are flogged as menace takes charge. Not one for the faint-hearted.
LL/MMM is available on Love Blast/Instruments of Discipline.
