DAX J Vinyl & CDs

Review: Dax J aims for irony on his latest techno album for Monnom Black, offering up the title 'War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength' to satisfy and make light of the innate political controversiality that thrives in and on techno's lifeblood. Referencing the political slogans in Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 - in which all language is shortened, policed and truncated, in order to limit the public paradigm to words and sentences sanctioned and pre-approved by the state - this is a dystopian sidestep for J, who views the paradigmatic Orwellian society as analogous to our global situation. Whether or not this is true or more complex than that, you can't deny that the connotation to techno is apt; the sense of being hemmed in by out-of-control historical forces is as routinised here as techno's signature repetitious judder always is. J homes in on this militancy by offering up a diesel-powered Brum sound, the likes of 'No Time To Lose', 'Anti Gravity Racing' and 'Liberation Techniques' marking impressive fusions of scattershot rhythmics and themes of primal fright, mirroring the blunt socioeconomic and psychic instruments used to exploit and constrain the unwitting human spirit in times of political oppression and forced / coerced conscription.