DISKREPANT : EX MACHINA LIBERTAS
Fractured Spaces Records
A nightmaresque dream sequence of fractured, digital technology overpowering and overwhelming nature with synthetic relentless all-consuming inevitability – the sound of desolate cyber-humanity and a dying once verdant world. In “Ex Machina Libertas” we are ushered into a world bereft of breath, imagination, emotion or impulse… instead the inexorable rise of ‘the machine’, soulless, endless, repetitive, stripped of any spark of identity or individuality has decimated anything natural or ‘living’. This truly is the sound of a dying world, ravaged by nanotechnology, forgotten by any deities, where only the microchip is law.
This is the sound of construction and deconstruction… of digitised immortality, of nature re-birthing itself in a cyber-ouroboric fashion. Again it’s an album that raises the question of what defines or separates noise or music? Even to my fairly acclimatised and musically ‘open’ mind, this clearly falls into the dark ambient noise category/genre, it is jarring, mechanical, desensitised, dissonant, the sound of pure synthesis, and would drive a ‘traditional’ music fan to distraction in minutes. Personally I both ‘get’ and enjoy this – but it is not for the faint-hearted.
The artist behind Diskepant is of course Stockholm’s own Per Ahlund, a man behind many outstanding sound-art and experimental music projects. His becoming a part of Simon Marshall-Jones’s FracturedSpacesRecords roster is indeed a “marriage made in machine hell” and proves to be a potent and devastatingly brutal aural assault. If you love the sound of dark ‘music’ future…then this astonishing album will be right up your network cable! (appalling pun I know). The future is bleak, the future is Diskrepant…the future is FracturedSpaces.
80/100
