With their new album, Digital Darkness, Somatic Responses lay down the raw anger and metallic, broken, saw-edged decay of seized-up industrial breakdown. Their use of jagged, spastic beats, quickfire stabs of rusty chainsaw buzz, and acid-oil-tinged spikiness recalls the social price that was paid when the coal-mining industry in the South Wales valleys was devastated in the last century.
The environs of South Wales were in fact my original stomping ground, and although the mining areas weren’t part of my childhood territory, several members of my family had at one time been miners. The least likely place you would think to find hard, driving industrial electronic music is a small Welsh mining town. However, that’s exactly where the brothers Healey (John S. and Paul A.), the aural engineers behind Somatic Responses, hail from; a place called Ammanford to be precise. It doesn’t take much to imagine the effects on families when the mines were closed a decade or two ago. Listening to this album brings to the surface the memories of the social devastation caused to communities all those years ago. The vituperative venom spat out by newly-redundant miners on television newscasts is here reflected in the machine-gun delivery, the dirty, rasping, and grating slabs of sonic grit, and the almost feral ambience that envelops each of the fifteen tracks.
This is angry music. The only way to express that deep resentment and anger is through pure electronics, wrapped around a hefty drum’n’bass substructure. The sentiment is best encapsulated in track three, “Human Bass,” where a malice-tinged sample declaims, “The human race deserves to be wiped out.” Backing up this misanthropic pronouncement is a pumping bassline, upon which are hung rasps, squeaks, and crunches which aim directly for the pit of the stomach. The bitter acidity veritably drips off this song, collecting into sizzling and steaming pools of biting erosion.
Throughout the album it feels as though the miners were angry, but but not just the miners: the mines and machines themselves were, too. The music is liberally peppered with thunderously violent and mechanised outbursts; it features pounding, seismic rhythmic behemoths invested with a physical presence and weight, metallic clankings, twisted beepings, and scattershot skitterings like hordes of angry insects on the march, as well as self-propelled weaponry carrying the means for destruction on a massive scale. This is a gargantuan steamroller of an album; when cranked up to maximum it is fully intent on inflicting as much collateral damage as possible.
If I may have one minor criticism, it is that I that fifteen tracks are perhaps too much. In all honesty I think the numbers could have been reduced to about ten and it would still have been a strong, sharp album. By the end my focus was waning and everything was becoming blurry. I think that may simply be a result of the fact that this was made for a club environment and not necessarily in a home situation. The sound seems too contained here on a small stereo and cries out for a decent (read large and loud) sound system to best show it off.
Despite my reservation, this is, on the whole, a quality set of songs, displaying both strength and versatility. It features a finely-honed sense of song structure and a keen compositional ability. On Digital Darkness the Healey brothers stoke up the vast engines, set the controls to max, and let the monolithic structure go about its acts of wilful and unbridled destruction without hindrance. You can either get on board for the ride or you can get obliterated by the machine after it rolls over you. It’s as simple as that.
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