Empires And Dance continued the trend towards a more austere electronic form of music. The lush textures of Real to Real Cacophony have turned frigid and glacial, depicting an endless travel in a pan-european metropolis, lost between past world-wars, an upcoming cyber age, and the paranoia of the cold-war era, a mosaic represented by the dance ritual "I Travel", the decadent hymns "Today I Died Again" and "This Fear Of Gods", the robotic deafening funk "Celebrate", the oriental techno "Capital City", and the nightmarish cyclones "Constantinople Line" and "Twist/Run/Repulsion".
Perhaps more original were "Kant-Kino" (a national anthem for a future empire in disarray) and "Room" (a feverish voodoo techno ceremony).
An expressionist record, second part in their European trilogy (along with Real to Real Cacophony and Sons and Fascination), torn between a vague past (the symphonic, cosmopolitan, exotic elements) and an uncertain future (the electronic arrangements, the cyber-age, the cold war threat); a chapter in the history of a civilization in crisis, which suffocates the individual. Get it here.
