This collaboration between Seth Horvitz’s Rrose alter ego & the Munich-based Lindsey Wang is a marriage made in heaven, as Wang’s dancefloor-driven beat mastery brings a sensuous physicality to Rrose’s lysergic forays into psychoacoustic phenomena. While I am quite fond of the opening “Ellipses,” it is almost instantly eclipsed by the three-song run of sleekly futuristic mindbombs that begins with “Stretcher,” which has the feel of an out-of-control train barreling through a series of violent electromagnetic squalls.
There is plenty to love in the details as well, such as the endlessly morphing and lurching machine rhythm, the viscerally sharp cymbals, and the flanging acid-inspired bass patterns. Later, “Haima” revisits similar terrain with equally brilliant results, as it deceptively opens with a groove that sounds like the foundation for a brilliant Carter Tutti Void track, but intensifying waves of distortion suck it through a dimensional portal around the halfway point to transform it into an unstoppably heaving, throbbing, and burrowing juggernaut of sci-fi-damaged psychotropic brilliance. I especially loved how the disjointed panning percussion of the piece’s first half suddenly seemed amazing once a missing layer was dropped into place that made everything instantly feel like an integral part of a coherent whole.
Elsewhere, the equally stellar “Inhaler” takes things in a more hypnotically droning direction, as a buzzing, shapeshifting, and rather viscous-sounding bass throb is propelled forward by an increasingly vibrant and complex rhythm through wave after wave of cool dubbed-out percussion flourishes and noise squalls. I believe I can safely say that Dermatology is my favorite release in either artists’ discography by a wide margin, as both are so obviously at the peak of their powers here that this album almost feels like it must have been sent been beamed back from a technologically and artistically advanced future that had distilled techno into mesmerizing, precision-engineered mindfucks completely purged of any unnecessary artifice or lulls in momentum.
