Transmigration
Primitive State
self-released
London’s Transmigration make the kind of gritty, opaque electro-industrial that has always thrived in the underbelly of the genre, and stands in stark contrast to cleaner, more club-oriented sounds. Which is not to say that the music on new release Primitive State is beatless or lacking in rhythm, but that the style in which the music is presented makes a virtue of murkiness and plain ugliness to help its songs land. Opener “Rot” runs roughshod on a fast sequence of synths and drums with some added metallic percussion accents, but the layers of grimy reverb and the snarled, pinched vocals (reminiscent of Evil’s Toy or your preferred dark electro act) make the whole affair feel meaner and more actively hostile, before the double time finale that shakes the whole song apart. The eponymous song that follows picks right up from it in terms of tempo, with fast kick-snare programming, vocal samples and quavering synth pads that billow around its various clanks and groans. “Extraction Process” wraps it all up with a beefy synthline that could be put to use in a speedy techno-body track, but is instead dragged behind deliberate drum breakdowns, a halting, queasy approach that matches its increasingly manic screeches. Those who prefer their electro lo-fi, bleak and misanthropic will get their fill, and more besides.
Nordvargr
Resignation IV
Cyclic Law
The recent reissue and reactivation of Nordvargr’s Reignation project made for a wonderful cross-section of Henrik Björkk’s musical interests beyond the EBM and death industrial worlds where he initially staked his claim. Those records’ loose ambient techno ethos detours through a number of territories similarly further afield with Resignation IV, doubling down on the concrete aggression of recent dark techno as well as increasingly fractured styles of ambient production. The production on the kicks and the ambience which surrounds them on pieces like “No Tears Wasted” feels simultaneously airy and marked by analog media degradation, almost like a hauntological take on the cryptic and occluded techno body music of Vatican Shadow. Elsewhere, the dreamy and drippy ambience of “Aska” and the underwater pulse of “Runa” apply a palpable yet pleasant pressure with their pads and drones, swaddling the listener. None of this is to say that Björkk is using this trek into spacier sounds as an excuse to go soft: the clattering neo-classical stomp of “Resistance” sounds like a vintage slice of similarly unyielding Swedes In Slaughter Native, and the heated, woozy spaciousness of the wheezing drones of “Silent Command Echo” feels entirely sympatico with the sublime charnel vistas which Björkk’s had on lock for decades.
