Electro Music Coalition 黑胶唱片和CD

Review: Serge Geyzel continues to merge and solidify musical political power by way of the esteemed Russian Electro Music Coalition, bringing four electro dark fresh'uns to our collective cochlear foreground. The 'Memorize' EP both uplifts and broods through tense melodics and inverse acid cascades, evocatively painting an emotional picture of a waste-lain future technoscape, in which some humanity still manages to peek through the cracks.

Review: We imagine "Neonicle" - judging by the affixes of the name alone - would likely mean something like "new instance of a half-biological, half-mechanical monstrosity, capable of lamellic self-regeneration when mortally wounded". Think of Terminator, grey goo or The Thing. Whatever idea the producer behind this alias had in mind when coming up with the name, you cannot deny that this nominal vagary still conjures up a certain set of (grisly, technological) images when paired with such solemn, fatal electro sounds. Machinic desecrations and vocal litanies abound on A-siders 'Kagome' featuring Julia Marks and 'Dirty Sanchez', both of which portray a tarred, oiled and feathered sound, as of an unstoppable automaton setting about a new reformative mission. Then 'Train' and 'New Culture' go on to utterly usurp and displace the old narrative, with the hip cyber electro of the latter - modifying the laryngeal emissions of vocalist Dyroplane - extending this robotic coup d'etat to lay down a new, sinister futural law.

Review: Fun fact: unlike most commodities, whose prices tend to rise with inflation, computer technologies have a tendency to cheapen over time. Muscovy producer Sin:it:sin (Andrew Sinitsin) seems to know this intuitively, his new 'Obsolete Technology' EP channeling the deep computations of hardcore electro abandonware; salvaged, fixit circuit-tinkerer permutations. 'Eru' and 'Infoseek' twinge with the restless, eroticised search for new information that marks the 21 Century psyche like no other; 'Infra-City Transit' and 'Solar Filter', meanwhile, freight smaller sonic PCB units over a fraught, dystopian B-side.

Review: Electro has so much representation already that we'd have hardly imagined it needed a Coalition, but colour us mistaken, of course. Presumably functioning both as intergalactic senate and record label, here, on 'Robot Connection 001', the Electro Coalition commission four delegates to lay down one lengthy sonic deposition each. Sound Synthesis kicks things off with a moving acid purging, with soaring cutoff filters aplenty, setting the diplomatic record straight with a grand metaphysical treatise - 'Physical Terrain' - on the cosmopolitical terrain thus faced. Then Arsonist Recorder objects by way of a pure immaterial antithesis, with 'T & A' locking in heavy freq-layered constrictions between an accursed beat; then Neonicle's 'Combination' and Sinitsin's 'People Are Aliens', finally, form a worthy synthesis and thesis-return respectively, ending on a suspension of humanly intelligible feeling, in favour of a bellicist's power fantasy in harsh snap-breaks and chromatic arp-arcs.