Its grit and exploratory post-industrial tones are drenched by fidgety synthetic blips and fuzzy robotic noises coming to life.
Dark electronics for the next planetary alignment
When the glitches and electrical pulsars fold together, everything makes sense. These darkened strands provided by Sommerfeld are simply baffling and worth every moment of your time. “A Squared Electron Charge” opens with clinical precision, its grit and exploratory post-industrial tones are drenched by fidgety synthetic blips and fuzzy robotic noises coming to life. And this is where the artist really excels; using microscopic flickering sound-effects and low-end shuffling drones (ref. “Over Twice the Speed of Light”) keeps this tightly packed extended player in a state of flux. The ever more crunchy soundtrack echoes of “In Units of Planck’s Constant” take us back to early Gridlock and Architect days of emotively surreal dystopia as the closing “Divide by Vacuum Permittivity” slows things down; its melodic shards cut through abstracted percussive pulses and eventually implodes during its final minutes of utter chaotic beauty. Dragon’s luminous “h (Remix)” casts slowly shifting beat patterns and scraped drone tones during its mechanical traverse. Alpha 137 rests high on our radar for the top releases of 2023—dark electronics for the next planetary alignment.
Alpha 137 is available on Ryu. [Bandcamp]
