Black Dice - creature comforts (2004)

This second Black Dice album initializes with the disconnected mass of "Cloud Pleaser", and already you know this is not gonna be a regular listening experience. The 6-minute mini-fantasia "Treetops" confirms this, displaying an evolving fabric of electronic gurgling, rambling rhythms, guitar strumming, random noises, and naive vocal ditties presented in an elliptical manner. The 9-minute "Creature" further raises the stakes, exhibiting an ectoplasmic avant-delirium made out of a vibrant hum, vocal outbursts, bleeps, random rhythms, whose harmonic and rhythmic density keeps being tweaked, keeps forming different configurations of the elements at bay, eventually resulting in a shrill Industrial rhythm.

The centerpiece is the 15-minute "Skeleton", the apotheosis of their biological music, a specter of ghostly noises, a fragmented living tissue that dissolves in other living tissues which in turn unite and form other living tissues, an algorithm that calculates three-dimensional synthetic possibilities. This mind-blowing track represents a peak, it's as simple as that. The 7-minute "Night Flight" is more two-dimensional, but still represents an orgy of chaotic sounds intent on disrupting the harmonic continuum. Get it here (includes pics of the CD).

Passage - pindrop (1980)

Pindrop begins with "Fear", which is tense and neurasthenic Electronic Post-Punk, whose closest relative is probably that first monumental album of Suicide (without the rockabilly). But "Troops Out" is surprisingly upbeat and poppy (could be an Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark outtake), while "Carnal" is theatric and pounding. "Watching You Dance" returns to the spirit of the first track, albeit in a calmer setting, that of the nocturnal threat looming around taut senses. Taut senses that overshoot in the paroxysm of "Hunt", the paranoid rampage of "From The Heart" and the unhealthy disquiet of "Locust", as well as another exercise at building intensity in "16 Hours". Finally, a relative release is found in "Carmen" (that sounds like The Fall would sounds if they played Synth Pop). However, "A Certain Way To Go" revisits the lunacy in a calmer, almost ethereal, but still threatening scenery, while the icy-cold somber calmness of "Prelude" fragments into agonizing outbursts, presenting the icing on the cake of this masterpiece. Get it here.