Hostile Architect
Nebuchadnezzar
Abelisk Audio
Australia’s Hostile Architect is working a fairly broad, cyberpunk style of electro-industrial that ropes in musical ideas from a variety of stylistic offshoots, and still even further afield genres. Where a track like “Gore Compressor (Society mix)” has more traditional growled vocals and monolithic pads, the track’s use of gunshot orch hits and loose rhythm programming gives it a groovier, funkier to contrast it’s moodier atmosphere. Alternately “Idiot Party” trades on the builds and sweeps of modern EDM, tossing in some handy rhythmic stop-starts and glitches to keep it varied. Where closer “Human Resources” follows in that vein initially, it quickly brings in breaks, and 8-bit sounding sequences that build on the cyberpunk trappings of the instrumental tracks. Perhaps the most interesting is “(Tresspasser in the) Atrivm”, where a mid-tempo dark electro cut that recalls Necro Facility and Interlace is fed through the project’s bionic futurist lens to produce a further hybridized take on the a familiar template. It’s all quite chaotic and sometimes the arrangements drift too far from the core melodies to really have them stick, but the overall style and execution is interesting enough to justify a listen.
Nagamatzu
1984
self-released
80s Ipswitch experimentalists Nagamatzu begin wriggling out of any box you’d care to put them in the moment you listen to more than a couple of their tracks, and that placeless anarchy only amplifies the more you dig into their discography. New archival release 1984 splits the hairs even further, establishing the missing links between the contemplative synth pastorale of 1983’s Shatter Days and 1986’s more stridently post-industrial Sacred Islands Of The Mad. Bringing together coldwave, proto-goth, programmed industrial bricolage, and the earliest foreshots of the pastel shades which would colour the infamous C86 tape a few years after, it’s a fast-moving instrumental sketchpad of textural colour and rhythmic shape. Even in terms of mood they stay fuzzy. Sure, you can hear the dissociative and antiseptic strains of JG Ballard from whom they lifted their name in the brooding churn of “The Witness”, but an approachable coziness can’t be denied in the harmonic bass and synth titter of “Deliberation”, akin to catching Eyeless In Gaza out in the park on a lazy Sunday. Inviting and austere all at once.
