(01.05.06) Scanalyzer began as a “I dare you” project between Chris Randall
(Sister Machine Gun, Micronaut) and Wade Alin (Atomica, Christ
Analogue), each man slapping the other with a dirty gauntlet, offering
the challenge to make musical mayhem. On The One And The Zero
is the result: their collaborative efforts at making a noise record.
But it isn’t really a “noise” record, oh no, not in the Merzbow sense
— filled with sheets of screaming static and tearing metal — or that
it is a Winterkälte record — sixty minutes of shrieking beats
intent on reducing your brain to a soup of loose neurons; On The
One And The Zero is Randall and Alin laying bare their love for
the metallic clatter of EinstÜrzende Neubauten, their inner furor
for Squarepusher beat collisions and their nascent tumescence for
glitch and static-pop. They’ve made a record of junkyard funk, a
fusion of synth-pop (sans such ephemeral nonsense as lyrics) and
machine noise that beats with just a jackhammer fury that it sweats
viscous oil.
Opening salvo “Moretech” can’t resist the Randall-style funk that
pervades his Micronaut records, even as it whistles with a scree of
white noise and over-stimulated beats. It’s still a dance track,
albeit one filled with caustic backblasts of beats and synthesizer
melodies DSP-ed into electrified whirlygigs of frenzied motion.
“Screamer” finds a human voice in the distorted wail of a siren, an
elongated ululation which struggles to free itself from a bruising
maelstrom of bubbling and blasting noise. “Neutron Dub” contains a
calm moment in the furious storm of the record: hiding between
calamitous fusions of heavy drums and searing synthesizers is a small
Speak ‘n’ Spell verse with patient glitch programming — a tiny oasis
of dubbed out mechanical words that tries to whisper the secret
phrases which make the boilers hum before the return of the heavy
stomp of the pistons. “Monotreme” — the closest the record comes to
an ambient track — churns with grandiose motion, a sluggish whirlwind
of sound that plays out as the soundtrack for a time-lapse formation
of fractal machinery on the surface of a dead world. The first
interstitial “Zwischenspiel” is a sound loop caught in a cyclotron,
spun hard and kicked out the other side as a half-formed Teutonic
floor burner that is kicked into a rack of CPUs where it is thrashed
and stretched into a slithering rhythm-meister — the shattered howl
of “Scan7” — all decked out with an over-abundance of reverb and the
slick metallic kiss of a rolling kick-drum.
There are four “Zwischenspiel” tracks, each lasting not more than a
minute and acting as interesting transitional elements. “Zwei” is a
recorded voice intoning some sage advice in German before it is
stabbed to death by the shiny beats of “Herstius.” “Drei” shops in
Mothboy territory (that dark-hop terrain not quite subterranean enough
to be Scorn), looking for a wicked sub-basement beat and a fragile
handclap to layer across a tender piano melody before being savaged by
the galloping heartbeat of “One Seventy Five.” They all came to sad
ends, these “Zwischenspiel” tracks, though “Vier” is my favorite for
its scattered scan through the radio dial. “Vier” sums up the thematic
thrust of On The One And The Zero: ideas considered, hammered
into shape by the addition of beats and static, caught up in a funk of
their own electrified valances, and then discarded in a rush of white
noise so as to be grist for the next pattern assembly.
“Screenblitter,” the final track, inadvertently shows its naked belly
to me. Sounding a great deal like a remixed version of Micronaut’s
“Perdition” (sans lyrics of course), “Screenblitter” doesn’t come off
as a cheap moment of recycling, but rather as Randall and Alin
applying new techniques to what they’ve done in the past. They’re
looking for fresh nuances and new textures in the folds of the old by
applying fresh patches and futuristic mods. They’re making a new
world out of the metal and plastics of the old. It’s a noisy future,
partly because of all the audio damage they’re causing in the studio.
Scanalyzer is the sound of the free underground radio stations of the
next generation: built in the basement, mastered in the kitchen and
blasted into the ether by a hand-made transmitter hidden out behind
the tool shed. Raw, noisy, and sure to raise blisters on your lips as
you kiss your speakers.
On The One And The Zero is out now on Positron.
