Faith In Flesh
Body Is Language
self-released
LA duo Faith In Flesh are cutting right to the chase, having released two EPs this year which spread across a wide range of electro-industrial and EBM terrain. Cronenberg samples, Leaether Strip atmospheres, and icy programming stabs get the mission statement across within the first few minutes of “Faith In Flesh”. The dense and spastic flailing of “Showreel” finds them capable of keeping a core rhythm swinging at a decent gait even as vocals and programming seem to collapse in upon their own mutated flesh. It’s not always the most compositionally immediate or hooky stuff, but the same could be said of a good portion of the acts Faith In Flesh are drawing inspiration from, and with the shifts Body Is Language makes from the grimmest of dark electro to funkier kicks, often within the same track, much of the fun comes from influence spotting. It’s not all throwback styles, though: the crooning vocal and sleek programming which skirt atop the rubbery breaks foundation of Body Is Language points more to recent acts with one foot in the past like Multiple Man or Kontravoid than Mentallo-styled ur-sources.
Mascarpone
Chronology of the Universe
Nocturbulous Records
The broader techno world’s dalliance with body music sounds has largely receded, and while many of the acts associated with that moment in time have also faded from view, several have stuck around, and are exploring sounds both closely related and further afield. The UK’s Mascarpone falls into the latter category, with a surprising but quite pleasing new EP of ghostly electro – and by electro, we mean like classic Detroit-styled electro, complete with fit-for-breaking noisy snares, rimshots, vocoders, cowbells and squirmy bass. Of course the genre isn’t all that far off from the darker electronic genres, ancestry in the teutonic menace and pulse of krautrock, but a joint like “Code Injection” makes the link abundantly clear: Kraftwerkian sequences and woops fly through the stereo field in foreboding fashion, while the simple analogue bassline is pumped by the syncopated kicks that give the sound its distinctive rhythm. Similarly, the robotic voices that haunt both “Antiscience” and “Heliocentric” bring a healthy dose of mechanized dread to their skeletal construction, recalling similarly dread-filled cuts from the turn of the Millennium by acts like Dopplereffekt. Functioning as a pure expression of classic electro and as a bridge to modern dark dance sounds (check the ghostly sounds that give structure and melody to “Spherical Mechanism”), it should serve as a reminder of the underlying DNA of electronic dance music of all genres we often take for granted.
