BlackAsteroid – Black Acid EP
BlackAsteroid, Black Sabbath, Black Death. An EP called Black Acid is hardly going to be the type of thing for a romantic evening in with your partner. Listen or buy.
BlackAsteroid is Bryan Black, with this release being on Speedy J’s Electric Deluxe label. This is an uncompromisingly brutal techno EP. Bryan explains “This EP is about chemistry and space. I chose to focus on raw, analogue sounds. I spent a lot of time playing with white noise, static and sub bass, often layering them together and coming up with new sounds in the process.”
Black Acid burns and fizzes like undiluted acid in a musical and chemical sense. This track wants to own your head. For head-in-a-bass-bin fiends. Hydrogen is a lighter than air gas and an essential of life, forming part of water. This isn’t nurturing your life, this blows you away into the vastness of space, leaving behind the bass hiss of the universe. Pressure crushes inwards like the straining of metal in Das Boot. The final track, Lunar Landing, gets the closest to humanity and optimism. The lunar module engines pulse. But somehow, hope emerges through the dread. Not an EP for the faint hearted. But if you like techno, stay with this. It will reward.
And if I can perve in a trainspottery sweaty-palmed moment, just look at how beautiful it is on vinyl!
Blurb: Presale through our own store now http://shop.electricdeluxe.net After exploding onto the scene last year with the highly charged and widely acclaimed CLR debut, ‘The Engine EP’, Bryan Black revises his BLACKASTEROID guise to present ‘Black Acid’: five tracks of lab-crafted techno, and a deeply groovy entry into the Electric Deluxe stable. Signed to Novamute in 2003, over the course of nearly a decade Black and his partner Olivier Grasset consolidated EBM, industrial, pop and electro fusions into four albums and a string of EPs. But it is as BLACKASTEROID that Black has come into his own as a unique and highly skilled sonic engineer, with ‘Black Acid’ marking further steps towards a purer, and yet boundless engagement with techno. From the EP’s punchy granular title track to the meticulous disorder surrounding “Hydrogen” and palette of alien, mechanical sounds that proliferate throughout—distinctly towards the EP’s space-themed closers: “Pressure”, “Lunar Landing” and “Lunar Escape”—‘Black Acid’ is an inventive and ever intriguing record. Like some estranged and maverick alchemist, Bryan Black mixes drops of discordant home-brewed noise with plenty of infectious floor-ready rhythms to form compounds that transcend straight listening and danceable orientations. Indeed, whether an aficionado of sound or simple beat junkie, ‘Black Acid’ will lure you in with one and hook you with the other. Turn up the bass and dive deep into its timbres to discover the weird and wonderful vistas of BLACKASTEROID’s sonic imagining.
Release/catalogue number: EDLX.027
That is magic. Just ordered it.
[...] is a set of remixes from last Autumn’s Black Acid release by Blackasteroid, which I described as “an uncompromisingly brutal techno EP.” Here are four remixes that remove the beats, [...]