Access To Arasaka
Utility
self-released
It’s been a few years since we’ve had a missive from Rochester’s Access To Arasaka, whose late aughts releases earned the project a spot at the big kids’ technoid table alongside the likes of Beefcake, Comaduster, and Gridlock in terms of taking post-industrial production to its glitchiest and yet most enveloping extremes. ATA sticks with what brought them to wider attention with new EP Utility, your reaction to which likely being shaped by your familiarity with the style. Despite the nominally spacey glitch n’ pads palette of opener “Intrusion”, there’s something warm and soupy about the undertow of the track’s low end, drawing a line from each little tic and flicker to a deep, near sub-aural base, and that mood holds sway through much of Utility‘s 25 minute run time. Things take a turn for the colder and more sinister by the time the penultimate “Evasion” begins to slink its way through the headphones, when wormy stutters begin to smear the pads beneath their chitinous weight and glitches irrupt as if purposely breaking up the already uneasy half time fill rhythms. That’s a very subjective synesthetic read on the record, of course (hell, whether the cover art reads as cryptically alien or pleasantly nostalgic to you is likely a generation gap issue at this point), but the impetus has always been on the listener to fill out the mind’s eye as Access To Arasaka floods the zone with pure code.
Trepaneringsritualen
A Diadem of Fire
Ant-Zen
Thomas Ekelund’s Trepaneringsritualen has never been a stranger to brevity, nor ferocity; while the Swedish death industrialist’s recent conclusion to his trilogy of collaborative EPs with Nordvargr under the moniker
ᚾᛟᚢ II // ᚦᛟᚦ ᚷᛁᚷ was on the drawn-out, droney and ambient tip, his new release for Ant-Zen A Diadem of Fire features the intense, noisy, blackened electronics that have become his musical calling card. Starting off with the brief atmospheric piece “Tainted Totem Nothing”, the EP segues violently into the title track, an obscure and grinding slice of percussion and swirling textures, with Ekelund’s low menacing voice escalating into metal growls, chanting and biting his way through the song’s walls of oppressive reverb and distorted drums. “With Hand and Heart” goes even further into chaotic dissonance, filtering and overdriving every sound including Ekelund’s feverish howls to unearthly and unnerving effect, as if hearing its rumble and screech come up from somewhere deep beneath you. And then it’s over, capped by the bookend Շainted Totem Nothing, whose similarities to the opener feeling altogether different for having come after the violence as opposed to preceding it. Like all of Trepaneringsritualen’s music, the intensity comes not just from the forcefulness of the delivery, but the ways in which the project positions its cacophony within opaque fields of menace.
