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Neil Campbell’s sixth volume of his solo efforts away from Vibracathedral Orchestra’s more democratic accommodating approach is an outstanding collection of different musical pieces. Volume 6 is probably the best yet, running the musical gamut between experimental, melody, drone and fun. The only way I can think to recommend this series anymore would be for me to go around selling it door to door.
self-released
I expected some drones, I expected a bit of feedback and I even thought there might be a barrage of noise. I didn’t expect "Untitled 3" to offer up heaven spilling otherworldly outpost noise and an elongated ‘lone piper on hilltop’ melody rising from a cloud of urban fumes. The rest of this CD-R is equally arresting and combines handheld percussion with sleepy lasers ("Untitled 5"), freeze frame songs of praise ("Untitled 5"), and squirreling wah-wah piece with eight or so different elements competing for my attention ("Untitled 4").
He starts proceedings with a rough and scuffed frantic rhythm with an underlying bleepage 33rpm record played three times as fast. But beneath this cranked murmur is a softer undercarriage of sound that ripples relaxingly. Membership of the Astral Social Club has also made me accept some artist’s propensity to cut their work short in mid zone-out. The sudden edits peppered throughout this release seem to make sense here. These cuts seem more like parts of the song rather than editing or space decisions. "Untitled 8" goes the other way and fades up in a back to front fashion seemingly full of organic crackles and steaming whooshes sounding very much like a passing party craft of some sort.
Closing the release in an unexpected—but very enjoyable—way is a live blow-out feedback drone-punk version of The Temptations "Get Ready". The guitar line that’s blasted here on an endless repeat is trapped within a chunk of flinted amber while a good time wallow in noise swirls around it. This meeting creates a kind of motionless funk as parts of the mix are lifted, through accident or design, in and out of the aural light making this ‘almost’ cover ripe for a nasty DJ set.
 
 
 
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![](/../../../brain/images/aidanbaker-remixes.jpg)
Arcolepsy
I figured that Baker's varied output would provide opportunity for each of these remixers to reconstruct his songs altogether and come up with something new and exciting. It'd be easy, I thought, to add all kinds of new material to his songs while retaining some elements of the originals. "Baker's musical palette is practically begging for reconstruction," I said, but evidently few people are sure of what to do with his music. According to the notes that come in this handmade package, each of the remixers used entire albums as sources for the music. Be that as it may, many of these songs are so boringly flat and dull that I can't imagine any one of them using more than just a few minutes of one song on each album. Both "Cloning (1 Blood Made 2 Remix)" and "Interweaver (Jazzy Mix)" attempt to add new beats to Baker's music, using his guitar drones and other electronic blurs to make music that adds up to nothing new or exciting at all. It's as though the remixers felt they could cover up their own lack of inspiration by disguising Baker's music as something deserving of washed up drum beats and club treatment. The Orb did this ten years ago, but I was excited about their albums. This is chill out music, something to ignore while doing the laundry or reading a book.
In some cases the remixers attempted to expand on themes that Baker had established in the source material. Building Castles Out of Matchsticks remixed music from Cicatrice, an album built around a theme of "mechanical/insectoid" guitar work. The drum breaks that the group added to the song certainly bring out a fluttering, nightmarish quality reminiscent of giant robot insects flying about, but there's just not enough flare and excitement in the music to make it stand out. It sounds, more or less, like a textbook example of how to make fast, inhuman beats fit in with any kind of music whatsoever. It sounds as though everyone must've thrown their hands up in the air in frustration because they weren't quite sure how to mold something interesting and musical out of music that is inherently shapeless, or at least constantly changing. In most cases it seems as though everyone said to themselves, "throw in some beats, that'll solve the problem!" Gruntsplatter and the Blameshifter both prove it is possible to play with Baker's music and leave the percussion at home.
Both used multiple sources as sound material for their remixes and both try to confront Baker's music without turning it into an electronic dance session. Their remixes are dense, layered songs breaking and popping with melodies, bending with inconsistencies, and constantly evolving. In other words, the good remixes on this disc don't mess with Baker's style so much as they attempt to shape it in new ways. Gruntsplatter's remix is especially involving, using five sources and mixing them expertly into a wave of sound pictures that slowly fall apart and fade away into a buzzing pulse that consumes the end of the track. It sounds more like a song unto itself than any of the other remixes on the disc because it is so imaginative and varied, not because it added some beats or rearranged a few sounds here and there so as to make a melody that didn't exist on the original album. When Gruntsplatter meshes two different pieces of sound together it is a convincing marriage that doesn't violate Baker's compositional style. Troum's remix, though using only one source, succeeds because it doesn't try to re-imagine the music entirely, placing it in a strange setting it could never belong in. Troum seem to let the original guide them on a new path, but they don't attempt to punch holes in the music and turn the whole affair into something it was never meant to be. They took caution and didn't attempt to relocate Baker's music altogether, they simply allowed it to move and play in new ways. It is no easy task remixing a drone-based work, but they do it and they do it well.
Despite the spattering of bad remixes on this CD, the three or four good tracks on here are stunningly good and represent what the possibilities of a remix still hold. The best material on the disc reshapes Baker's music and places it in a new setting, but without going overboard. The addition of beats and melodies doesn't make for a satisfying remix of Baker's music. It takes a little more imagination than that and the ability to play with sound as living thing and not just some source to add beats beneath. Beyond that, it takes the ability to imagine something new in something to inherently bare and it shows on this disc that such a task is much harder than it might seem. Of the eleven artists on this disc, only four passed the test with any degree of success.
samples:
- Millimetrik - "Interweaver (Jazzy Mix)"
- Cordell Klier - "I've Been Waiting for You"
- Gruntsplatter - "Predatory Sediment"
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![](/../../../brain/images/kitessuperiormoon.jpg)
Mountain Collective For Independent Artists
Superior Moon, a 3” mini CD released on a limited run of 1000 copies ontiny imprint Mountain Collective for Independent Artists, is anexcellent showcase for his sometimes deranged, sometimes haunting brandof musical experimentation. Whereas his last full length Peace Trialswas a good, if not flawed effort, this album's nine untitled tracks aremuch shorter and to the point than some of his previous material.
“Track 6” begins with a relatively gentle swell of electronicbeats with subdued electronic squiggles appearing over the beat. Thenext song begins with what sounds like a spliced sample, slowlybuilding along with a sleigh bell before being demolished by someelectronic hiss in the last ten seconds. “2” is anothertrack built on top of what sounds like electronic beats, but featuresthe sound of a swelling synthesizer as well. “9” isanother impressive track, one that approaches the caustic break beatfreak outs of an artist like Kid606.
While all the songs here areuniformly good, my one complaint is that it appears as though Kitesmight be reigning in his sound just a bit. While a few tracks do lashout with harsh tentacles of electronic hiss, for the most part thesetracks are dominated by subdued beats and slowly swelling sections ofwhite noise. On the other hand, this restraint does serve to make thisrelease one Kites’ most accessible yet. And while there are surelygoing to be those who complain that this accessibility will equal alesser record, the fact is that it is just indicative of the type ofrisks Forgues is willing to take with his one man project.
samples:
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![](/../../../brain/images/wiese-magical_crystal_3.gif)
Helicopter/Kitty Play
Standing at just over 17 minutes long and composed of 37 different tracks, Magical Crystal Blah Volume 3 is a different kind of recording for John Wiese. Many of his four and five second songs are loud, free-form noise pieces that buzz by too quickly for me to take in (as in the compilation released by Troniks recently). Here, however, they are relatively dynamic wave forms that bounce, gurgle, spark, and fade just as much as they rumble and scream. That doesn't make it any easier to digest everything he tosses at me, but it does make listening a lot more intriguing.
It's surprising to hear this kind of range coming from Wiese, considering his penchant for harsh approaches. On this EP, it is easier to associate all of his sounds with something, to draw all the noise into the imagination, despite all of it flashing by in five and six second barrages. There are circular saws, trains, decomposing switchboards, microscopic flatulence, and a myriad of other events captured in Wiese's approach to the material. On many of these tracks Wiese sounds inviting and I'd like to think he'd sound that way even to those who've never heard a shred of noise in their life.
Be that as it may, that doesn't change the fact that there isn't much to commit to memory on this record. All the sounds are fun and enjoyable, but because the album is so haphazardly constructed, it is difficult to catch and keep anything in memory long enough to enjoy all its quirks. In some ways the album's fantastic rate of travel makes it simultaneously intriguing and disposable. Once the album is over, replay is almost necessary because much of what just happened will have seemed like a flash of light too sonically ambivalent to pin down. What Wiese has to his advantage is that many of the sounds seem to repeat themselves, although in slightly altered forms, throughout the EP. The rumbling of subway cars is in the beginning, middle, and end of the recording and many of the tiny, almost quiet blips that pop up all over the record provide some form of continuity.
Still, it's hard for me to imagine when I'll want to put this on again. Once I have it in my player, it's an enjoyable and rapid listen filled with all sorts of industrial crunching and playfulness. Once it is out of my player, I find myself forgetting about it. Not because the noise is bad, but because it seems like Wiese has intentionally made this stuff hard to grasp. How in the world am I supposed to keep any of these tracks fresh in my mind? There are a couple of one and two minute pieces that I can readily identify as soon as they begin (they tend to be the most abrasive), but everything else is a haze. Maybe Wiese intended it that way and this stuff is supposed to fade from memory over time. That's a shame, though, because I think any longer material from him in this form would be spectacular. His brevity and refusal to give the listener even the slightest grip makes this release more difficult and more of a chore to enjoy.
samples:
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![](/../../../brain/images/pollardcompoundeye.jpg)
Merge
The brevity ofmany of the songs ("I'm a Strong Lion" clocks in at only 1:08) and goingquickly from one to another keeps things interesting, but it also makesthe album feel even longer than it is. Despite the diversity of stylesranging from heavy '70s rock ("Field Jacket Blues") to jangly guitars("Boy in Motion") to abrasive ("Kensington Cradle"), the songs fittogether well and share a common layered and heavy feel. The lyricsthroughout are abstract and sparsely beautiful. The album is filledwith a rich density, both in the sheer volume of material and in thedetail of each small gem.
samples:
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This, the first of three limited edition Death Row Radio 7" singles coming in 2006, contains the gentlest ‘fuck you’ to creationists I’ve ever heard. If the child behind the voice of the A side can understand and explain the origins of the universe, then maybe there still is hope for the knuckle-dragging right wingers of the world.
Distraction
"Born" weaves live and processed beats together into a crackling touch rhythm. As this percussion lays a beat, the song takes shape, but it sounds like it's being constructed backwards, revealing itself perfect piece by perfect piece. A beautiful distant piano sinks briefly as the voice of a young child is heard—probably sampled from some relatively obscure source—clearly explaining the origins of the universe. The melody is squeezed out drop by drop as a mini choir, flute, and chimes elevate the song into one of the finest pieces of ghostly analogue lullaby gospel to come from this or any other part of the world.
The flipside, "Come to Light," has a core of a bright (but incomplete) jazzy guitar loop which provides the rhythmic pull of the song with the clockwork beats supporting. The song’s other melodic satellites orbit and overlap this central piece, letting it flow while appearing to build and swell.
In this dark winter of bedroom electronic acts with borrowed acoustic guitars, the weaving of analogue and digital sourced sounds is not exactly a rarity. Cracked music software seems to be all the rage, most of the product is something instantly reminiscent of something else, and the music usually ends up in an unsurprising grainy/melodic/electronic style. With the tidal flood of sound-alikes rolling in it's difficult to sift the gold from the dirt, so I thank my lucky stars that I came across D_RRadio.They might take their time with completing the music and as impatient I am for the next instalment, I’ll be waiting.
 
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ATP
Difficult music usually presents itself in one of three ways: as an academic experiment; as a means of expressing some idea in a non-conventional manner; or as a purely aesthetic recording meant to entertain or provoke particular moods or mental states. Fursaxa doesn't fit any of those very well at all and now that I think about it, most of this psychedelic folk stuff completely misses the mark on each one of those three qualifications. I don't mean for those descriptions to serve as a marker for whether or not a piece of music is going to be good or not, but I can't enjoy an album unless it evokes some human qualities that I can relate to. Short of being able to do that, I enjoy listening to bands that want to mess with classical structures or stretch the limits of what it means to be musical and so forth, that sort of playfulness can be entertaining.
Lepidoptera is as predictable as a Presidential speech, however. There are going to be tribal-like moments on this record, there will be wailing guitars that hush into meditative drones, and there will be vocals that make no sense and do nothing but muddle the record with ideas that only serve to remove me from the music instead of draw me into it. In other words, it is about as experimental as smoking marijuana and as exciting as getting pulled over by the cops after having a few too many at the bar.
There's nothing about this record that isn't old news. That isn't to say that it isn't pretty in some respect, but I honestly feel nothing but complete apathy toward it. Keep on chanting, keep on strumming that guitar, and keep on pounding on the drums and I still won't care about the music. If I were on acid, this would be the least interesting thing happening around me. It's as though Burke and her fellow musicians want to be as strange as possible while drawing the least amount of attention to themselves.
Using what has become the conventional vocabulary of hallucinogenic music, Fursaxa simply mumbles through eleven tracks of what might be called heavenly vocals, innocent melodies, and transcendent arrangements, except none of the songs add up to any of those. It seems to me that a lot of this New Weird America music exists in name only and that the musicians writing the best haunting and strange music simply keep their mouths shut and let the music do the talking for them. I can think of several other bands that do what Fursaxa is attempting to do, but a thousand times better. Not one of those bands has ever claimed to be part of any movement nor have they ever bothered trying to describe what their music is. I'm not sure that Fursaxa has claimed any alliance, either, but her record sounds like a lot of other music that bores me to death, so I'll go ahead and assume Burke is trying real hard to sound like her tripped-out brethren, all of whom sound flat and ridiculous to me, too.
It'd be great if there were something new going on here, but all I hear is the same hippy attitude posing as new experimental music. To make it worse, these hippies aren't even preaching ideals of love or peace, they're just talking bullshit and hoping to be revered for what amounts to total nonsense. Listen closely enough and you'll hear they're saying nothing at all.
samples:
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![](/../../../brain/images/kiki-boogybytes_01.jpg)
The brilliant cover—a still of the artist mid-headbang,shirtless and zombified against a slate gray background—sets the mood of thisset rather well. Kiki’s music has alwaysbeen some of the more recklessly flamboyant on the label, though never withouta stylized distance, his disco-fried tracks always taking the reference to itsbreaking point before pulling back into dark, almost gothic remove in bizarreemphasis and homage to the plasticity of its creation. Tracks like “Hott!,” and “Luv Sikk,” speak apessimistic cheekiness in titles alone, and the stiff pan-ethnic borrowing ofthe tracks in turn accentuates both the irresistibility of their rhythmic coilsand the desperate, regenerate puppet-dance inspired. A Kiki mix is similarly disco-derived withthe dark gurglings of electro and gothic crooning along the bottom.
The mix begins with one its best tracks, from ex-Wax Trax-er/PTV-iteFred Giannelli. “Distant Gratification” could be a mood-piece for the wholedisc: cold; comfortable electro sputtering flat; with synthetic arpeggiosflattened and reduced to a depressive wallpaper. Although distant, the personality of the trackcomes through in subtle filter and is made more powerful for it. Boogybytesnever reaches above this strangely addictive reanimation, even during Kiki’sfrequent blending of newer Bpitch tracks like his own “End of the World” orEllen Allien’s electric “Your Body Is My Body.”
The mood is sublime automatism, bolstered by a few brillianttracks like Troy Pierce’s nearly industrial “Smack The Black Off of Ya” andDonal Tierney’s “Verse 2 The Chorus,” effectively mixed with Andre Kraml’s“Safari,” a track that Kiki and Silversurfer have remixed in the past. One of the most appealing things about the discis that, despite the track listing, Kiki is often mixing in at least one otherunlisted item, making for new avenues of comparison or discovery within the relativehomogeneity of atmosphere.
A few missteps occur toward the end of the hour+ length whenseveral weak vocal tracks are worked in. Microhouse artist Turner’s “When Will We Leave (Robert Hood mix)” was nodoubt included for the drowning, swallowed urgency of the vocal, though thepulse of the track is all wrong and ends up mixing poorly. Likewise, tracks by better-known artists Slamand Infusion color the end of the mix with cheap imagery, altering any subtletyor tact in Kiki’s complexifying of the sound’s plasticity. While not the mindblowing mix I’d expect tohear from such a great producer, Boogybytesis nonetheless entertaining throughout, and it will certainly be nice to hearwhat comes of this series in the future.
samples:
- Donal Tierney - Verse 2 The Chorus
- Fred Giannelli - Distant Gratification
- Troy Pierce - Smack the Black Off Ya
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![](/../../../brain/images/modeselektor-hello_mom.jpg)
On past 12” singles (the only things they’ve put out until now),Modeselektor seemed to me the token glitch or IDM artist on the Bpitch Controllabel. The gloss of precise cuts andcomplex, dubby bass parts made a Modeselektor track stand out among label compsor remix collections, though from a distance, I think, the glitch factor endedup familiarizing the tracks, separating them from a label aesthetic founded onthe odd, the unpredictable, and the contradictory. The hyperactivity of Modeselektor’s earlytracks, though at home in a one-off remix for labelmates, felt oftengratuitous, pushing the music toward a thinking-man’s stasis, a numbingmonochrome when the label’s larger goal seemed always a technicolor amalgam ofpersonality and stylization, past and future.
If thosefirst 12” singles alienated label fans, the duo’s first full length might do the samebut in the opposite direction. Many of these tracks hit on what I’d call instrumentalhip-hop by today’s standards; even the ones without someone toasting ontopachieve urgency and emotion through the play of thick hooks bracingagainst themetallic underlayer.
The duo iscareful to counter their more mechanized moments with vocal humanity, and thesetracks become some of the best: TTC’s French rap pushed through a kaleidoscopeof stuttered arabesques in “Dancing Box” or Sacha Ferera’s relentlessM.I.A.-ism, “Silikon.” Elsewhere, trackslike “In Loving Memory” or Paul St. Hillaire’s “Fake Emotion” create perfectisolations from dancefloor, blending bright dub with the cool streamlining ofGerman techno, as Mouse on Mars might. With “I Love You,” the album closer, Modeselektor proves that they’veeven mastered their glitchist tendencies, creating a sugary, transcendenthomage to classic IDM.
The hardened,brutally anthemic techno that has dominated most of the recent Bpitch 12” singlesmight be the only thing left un-tried on HelloMom!, though remixes are soon to follow. A new favorite of mine, the record is surprisingly solid, in consistencyand emotional gratification, and gives back in many different listeningenvironments. Hi mom.
samples:
- Fake Emotion (feat. Paul St. Hillaire)
- In Loving Memory
- Ziq Zag
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![](/../../../brain/images/mike_cooper-spirit_songs.jpg)
Hipshot
In the past, I've made the case for Mike Cooper as a unique and largelyunderappreciated voice in modern music (read my previous reviews here and here),and these two new CD-Rs on the artist's own Hipshot label present yetmore evidence of Cooper's willingness to push out the boundaries of hisart. Spirit Songs attempts a complex synthesis of the three approaches mentioned above - song, improv and loops; while Giacintois an understated tribute to Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi, afascinating tangent into abstract guitar drone. Once again, bothalbums are limited, handmade CD-Rs available exclusively from theartist himself, who suggests putting cash inside a birthday card andsending it to his address in Rome.
Spirit Songs is my favorite of the pair: a glorious marriage ofall three of Cooper's previous musical strategies; creating a stunninghybrid. The album contains 10 songs performed on fingerpickedacoustic and electric lap steel guitar, often looped and treated inreal time, with Cooper singing lyrics in a quietly meandering,semi-improvisatory manner that recalls a more polished Jandek. The style of songwriting is immediately recognizable as blues, but anintuitive, idiosyncratic form of folk-blues, with Cooper narratinglaments over matters personal and global, gentle universalisms thatdouble as political messages. All of this occurs over a looserhythmic framework provided by various noisy loops, with cracks,scratches and pops, echoes and distortions skipping out from everyrefrain. It's a gentle cacophony with subtle undercurrents ofbeauty and sadness, effortlessly nostalgic but still very rooted in thenow. I think that Mike Cooper can genuinely call this style hisown; I've never heard anything remotely like it, and it worksbeautifully, highlighting both song and singer, as well as the happyaccidents resulting from the intersection of structure and chaos. Most tracks seem to be recorded live to tape, with the title trackcoming from a live performance in front of an audience. In asense, Cooper prepared us for this direction with the unexpectedintrustion of song into his otherwise shambolic live CD-R Reluctant Swimmer/Virtual Surfer released last year, but Spirit Songs fully fleshes out the ideas only briefly glimpsed in that performance.
Giacinto represents yet another new approach from Cooper, thistime using the specific sound archicture of his National tri-plateresophonic guitar, exploring the sound produced on open strings with ahandheld battery-operated electric fan. This produces acontinuous note, not unlike an e-bowed electric guitar, but on theNational tri-plate acoustic it produces strange overtones and complexharmonics that shift, bend and mutate as the fan is applied atdifferent angles to differente combinations of strings. Thisresults in a suite of strikingly unique drone pieces which have aspecific alien resonance that immediately sets them apart from mostother drone musics produced with analog or digital methods. Ofcourse, Cooper cannot help but fill out these drone compositions withhis live-sampling and looping techniques, producing several long-formpieces that gradually build up layers of hypnotic drone at differenttones and pitches, building up an immersive sonic atmosphere that attimes reminded me of Sublime Frequencies' Broken Hearted Dragonflies CDof "insect electronica" recorded in Southest Asia. The differencehere is that Cooper makes his insects buzz, hum and sing along with hisincredible improvisatory instinct; only occasionally does the joke wearthin on Giacinto, which is a lot more than I can say for many other current groups producing low-tech drone.
Sometimes it can seem—especially to people like me who write aboutmusic and receive thousands of flimsy CD-R demos and promos everymonth—that recording and releasing music has become almost too easyand democratic these days, leading to an underground market floodedwith homegrown crap that would have been better left languishing on thebedroom floor. An artist like Mike Cooper, however, with hiswillingly unprofressional and strictly uncommercial home operation, isproducing amazing music to rival the best of the current critical"canon" of experimental music, can restore my faith in the newdemocracy of the digital age.
Spirit Songs samples:
Giacinto samples:
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![](/../../../brain/images/collabs3000metalism.jpg)
Novamute
The insertion of an apparent "equal partner" with a somewhat less reliable solo discography led me to wonder if Metalismmight contain a diluted, tamer sound. Thankfully, such fears wereunnecessary, and those who have followed Paap's career to this pointcan rest assured of what lies beneath the plastic shrinkwrap. Darknessundeniably defines this industrial strength outing, starting from therumbling ambience, and subsequent rhythmic as well as arrhythmicinterruptions, of "Lego," which segues smoothly into the machine funkof the following track "Modish Ride."
Still, the album's truly nasty side remains relatively subdued until"Hilt," a clanging, howling track driven by a heavy, sludge-soaked beatakin to labelmate T. Raumschmiere's ugliest work. From there on, thetempo rises as does the noise level, with the distorted bass of"Tunox," and arpeggiated squelches of "Acid Trezcore" capable ofensnaring helpless clubgoers and passive home listeners alike. Thelengthy breakdown on "Cream 3" is nothing short of decimating and thethought of experiencing these grinding, frying electronics on asuperclub's soundsystem inspires chills. Thankfully, the initiallybeatless "Eventide" gives weary feet a break with swelling cinematicstrings and bleak supportive drones before finishing with the disperateclosers "Lava" and "Assault." A live recording of "Trikco," originallyreleased on a Collabs 12" from the duo, appears as a bonus and, whileappreciated, disrupts the album's flow, preventing much in the way ofclosure.
While never quite matching the expansive journeylike qualities nor the furious BPMs of Paap's 2002 stunning Loudboxer, Metalismmakes up for its occasionally haphazard lack of cohesion with animpressive 74 minute presentation of high caliber composition andproduction acumen. I should have expected nothing less.
samples:
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