Robin Fox & Anthony Pateras
Exquisitely packaged (the cover work by Sarah Pirrie is outstanding), intriguingly diverse, this succeeds as a series of excursions into a strange, painful territory we can touch with our fingers but can’t see with our eyes. This is nowhere more true than the closing track ‘Recombinant’, which spins a web of whining feedback around gentle chimes, creating a mournful, faintly sinister atmosphere which reverberates between the listener’s ears. Similarly ‘Cranking The Dwarf’, one of the noisier track on the album, merrily twangs on your nerve endings, with its chatter and gibber enveloped by blisters of grating distortion. ‘Circuits & Glass’ is another standout, with bursts of full-on electronic noise punctuated by speaker feedback and abrasive clatters and tinkles. There’s a lot of this sort of stuff about, and in the main it sounds like a couple of blokes playing about with their kit, making it up as they go along. That may be the case with Pateras and Fox, neither of whom I have previously heard of, but if they can produce a record of this quality by so doing then good luck to them. ‘Circuits & Glass’ could be Merzbow at his best, and I can think of no higher compliment than that.
Stewart Gott
Fluxeuropa – 3 June 2003