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Theologian/Strom.ec, "Hubrizine"
Hubrizine sees Theologian's extremely prolific Lee Bartow reworking material provided by the duo of Jasse Tuukki and Toni Myöhänen (Strom.ec) into a noisy mass of sci-fi tinged electronics in tribute to Philip K. Dick. Even with the large number of Theologian releases, he shapes this material into an album that shapes the ugliness of noise into captivating musical structures with an impressive depth that makes for a distinct, unique sounding record.
Many of these contemporary artists working in this post-/death-/whatever industrial framework are content to simply pile digital reverb on top of metal scrapes and synth noises and call it an album, but Hubrizine has so much more complexity than this.Even through the echoing drone and skittering pseudo-percussion of "Ubik", melodic electronics shine through, and the whole thing has a distinctly composed sensibility to it.The elongated tones and fuzzy bursts of "Flow My Tears" place it in some grey area between beautiful and ugly, with the ambiguity adding greatly to the piece as a whole.
Other times the two projects choose to lean more into one extreme than the other."EM-19" begins with an almost orchestral loop that soon gives way to overdriven crunch, heavily processed screams and metallic banging.Even within these chaotic elements, they manage to put together a structured, orderly piece that never feels random or directionless.At the other end of the extreme would be "World War Terminvs", where things pared down to a ghostly drift.Sometimes ominous, other times delicate and beautiful, it sticks to the less harsh sounds.
The album's centerpiece is the lengthy title composition that brings all of these disparate elements together.What may be guitar generated expanses of feedback surge throughout the opening minutes, with melodies snuck in amidst the noise.The guitar noise drops away to bring the melodies to the forefront, but gets noisy again, with a more cybernetic and evil quality to it.It all builds into a full on power electronics assault, with blown out electronics and harsh vocals resulting in a fitting climax.
While the work of these two artists is stylistically clear, the album is not something that can be easily pinned down as far as genre goes.This is largely because they manage to avoid the clichés and demonstrate a compositional ability that is more complex than most of their peers.It is uncommon that "harsh" artists such as these build in so much song-like style and progression into their work.That is exactly what makes this album excel, and stand head and shoulders above so many others.
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