Listen: Freejack – The Mind Exhumed

Freejack is Melbourne’s Liam Osborne, who you may know better as a member of Flesh World and, formerly, the artist behind Synthetic Texxxture. Freejack is Osborne doing quiet and ominous abstract techno music, low BPMs and no fuss. ‘The Mind Exhumed’ reminds me of my favourite Muslimgauze LP Dome of the Rock, in the way it combines several simple musical ideas and pushes them until they they start to sound like languages, like the mechanisms and the repetitions are conspiring to warn us of something.

‘The Mind Exhumed’ features on a cassette entitled Untitled Document 2, which is available through Osborne’s Future Archaic label. It follows, naturally, Untitled Document 1 (which is still available) and comes ahead of a new cassette due for release soon entitled The Blood Of The Rich Will Fill Our Streets. All Future Archaic releases can be purchased through Warehouse Music Disposal.

Freejack will appear live in Melbourne on February 28 alongside Word of Life Church SS, Von Einem, Asps, Prolife, Flat Fix and Cale Sexton. Full details here.

http://future-archaic.tumblr.com/releases

Listen: Synthetic Texxxture – L Ron Techhard

Just in case you didn’t read the headline, let this sink in: this new Synthetic Texxxture song is called ‘L Ron Techhard’. Maybe I’m still drunk-via-osmosis from interviewing wine connoisseurs Superstar the other night, but that’s a pretty hilarious title.

Anyway! We’ve featured Synthetic Texxxture before, but now we know it’s the work of Melbourne guy Liam Osbourne. Don’t know much else about him really, but he’s playing at Sound Summit at the weekend so maybe I’ll collar him for some more info (y’know, street address, passport number, credit card etc). The track below (entitled ‘L Ron Techhard’!) is a lot more assertive and disorientating than the track we featured a little while back. For some reason, and I may be drawing a long bow here, it kinda reminds me of breakcore without the breaks, almost. It’s got that very ugly, sledgehammer approach, and that over-zealous application of synth-knobs (listen how it modulates!) that puts me in mind of a more atmospheric, dreamy Nasenbluten. Maybe.

Anyway, enough of this. The sooner this guy releases something proper, the better. Happy Friday.

Listen: Synthetic Texxxture – Cool Dad

A couple of months ago I saw an ad for a science fiction magazine that used a flow chart to determine whether you were a “true” science fiction fan or not. The first question on the flow chart asked whether you had seen and enjoyed Star Wars. If the answer was no, it basically said that you don’t like science fiction and you should go away. This is an outrage and an embarrassment. Star Wars isn’t science fiction, it’s space opera. Shitty whimsical drama. Pure pap.

Melbourne’s Synthetic Texxture is pure dystopian decay. It’s real science fiction: gridded virtual worlds, dreamily modulating portamentos, a looped melody line that reminds us that dirt is still there, somewhere. A sense that walls are closing in, that things are coming to a head, that systems have become so convoluted as to resemble sentience. There are constant pulses in this track, but you don’t want to move to them: they’re like a distant emanation, something from the factory a block away, and the bleak piano loop is the silence it interferes with.

Synthetic Texxxture isn’t futuristic in the sense that you haven’t heard it before. There’s terrabytes of this stuff on the net. But this is especially effective, the way the mix is eerily peripheral. Maybe soon the world itself will show screen tear. Maybe the world’s anti-aliasing will fizzle out. Here are some books you should read while listening to this:

Roadside Picnic – the Strugatsky Brothers
The Ice Trilogy – Vladimir Sorokin
Cyclonopedia – Reza Negarestrani
Fanged Noumena – Nick Land
Perdido Street Station – China Mieville