Roasted industrial techno, abused body music, harsh and gnarled electronics. Music for different dance-floors, and once you get a taste for this particular poison there’s no going back.
Once the Lux Rec guys went into the backroom of electronic music, gave the sunken eyed keeper a nod and ducked into the darkness, they’ve decided to stay. Industrial. EBM. Black light techno. These have been the mainstay with the Swiss label excelling in the underbelly. Italy´s Mace is a recent filth peddler to have been drafted onto the twisted side, with the progenitors of blackness, Savage Grounds, wishing their own brand of audio pestilence.
The Italian artist needed very little “drafting,” his releases on Eclipsemusic and Veleno Viola being existing proof of this man’s penchant for the dark electronic arts. Four Things Everyone Will Be Talking About Today collects together a quartet of bullied, bruised and brutalized tracks. Rhythms are for the floor, but the chords that choke them are anything but. A disenfranchised, disenchanted punk, fist into teeth, lance pierces the 12″. Accompanying this discontent is an angst, a palpable energy that boils from frustration into aggressive rage. Beats are smashed into pieces, metal digs into metal and steam hisses in the slashing “Deregulation.” That same momentum can be heard in “Banks Battered”, but the ferocity is tapered allowing brighter moments to dawn. “Deregulation,” “Banks Battered,” there might be a theme developing here. “Bonds Panic” sits between the latter two, a slow and heavy piece of broken percussion and crushed bass. The close is a collaboration with Diana Berti aka Violet Poison arriving for “Metal Sinks.”The finale is a strangely intoxicating brew of horror machine music. Drums flash, stabbing a thick reverberating string set.
Lux´s first moves into the darkness were made by Savage Grounds, and the team of CCO and Daniele Cosmo return with the festive cheer of Atrocities. Six works of distortion distilled, static soaked machine groan and grunt make up this mini album. Tracks like “The Comfort of Agony” and “What Has Become of Us” will leave hearts, minds and speaker cones throbbing in pain. Percussion is the central tenet of the 12” and 7” set, the Swiss men wrapping barbed wire melodies around broken toms and thump. Speed is not as important, BPMs plummeting in the murk of “Our Decaying Body”, instead it is the grumbling intent that is the focus. “Vapours” pulls you into a world of haze, glass showering amidst bass and hiss. “A World of Savagery” has the meanest streak of the sextet. Acid lines boil and burst, splattering thick pillars of pound with grease and grime
I can understand why Lux decided to venture behind the curtain, to peer into the shadows. In that backroom lurk artists, those on the peripheries, who are attacking electronic music from an entirely different angle, running blades into past idols and the demands of the club. Mace is one of those artists on the margins, delving into the isolation and finding some amazing alternative sounds in the soup of alienation. Savage Grounds come at dereliction from a different angle, but the product is no less perverse. Roasted industrial techno, abused body music, harsh and gnarled electronics. Music for different dance-floors, and once you get a taste for this particular poison there’s no going back.
Both releases are available on Lux Rec..
