Flesh, soul and machines

The fusion of ambient, dub, metal, jazz and industrial sounds, blended through a often hallucinated and claustrophobic logic, turned the duo Techno Animal into one of the most creative explorations in electronic music between the Nineties and the start of the following decade. The label illbient is also used for them, identifying a fusion of hip-hop sampling techniques with ambient and dub sounds, first coined by Dj Olive and Dj Spooky. Through a string of experimental albums oriented towards long compositions, often visionary and hypnotic, they established themselves as an example of boundary-less composition, geared towards exploring the sonic potential of sampling and digital composition.

Produced by Broadrick himself, who also cultivates this parallel career, the debut Ghosts (1991) rightfully ranks among the most terrifying albums of the period. Imposing in its total 72 minutes, it is dominated by three colossal tracks and two slightly more contained in size, around which a few shorter pieces develop.

The shorter “White Dog” is a work built on loops that allows a few pauses for the timpani but still closes with a Hitler sample that carries over into “Freak Fucker”, under four minutes without a beat dominated by electronic reverbs and echoes. After more than 22 minutes of sonic terror, the atmospheric, liminal jazz of “The Dream Forger” is pure balm for the psyche, a faint melody that builds a weightless, dreamlike dance.

A pair of gargantuan compositions follows. The first, “Tough Cop/Soft Cop”, intertwines rhythms and distorted guitars for over eleven minutes, using reverbed voices in a horror-movie fashion and deformed horns, reminiscent of the free-jazz of Albert Ayler, as if imitating the dance of otherworldly flutes that Lovecraft imagines is played so as not to awaken Azathoth, “the blind idiot god who gibbers and blasphemes at the centre of the Universe”. And it's precisely from this divine figure that the spectral music box “God vs. Flesh” picks up, running over 23 minutes in total: a cloud of sound, floating between nocturnal tollings and eternal drones, reveals itself as a bubbling magma after more than a quarter of an hour, and it's as if, in the midst of a meditation session, one gained access to another dimension, alien and vertiginous; in the long run, however, a mournful melancholy prevails, swept away by the infinitely reverberated explosion of the finale, an ectoplasmic apparition of overwhelming emotional intensity, a vision of the divine that stuns, dazzles and disorients in its incomprehensibility, and which continues into the closing “Spineless”.

The wizard of the dreamlike in music, Jon Hassell, collaborates on the lengthy “Flight Of The Hermaphrodite”, an exotic dance from the remote future that evolves into a mechanical funk and then into a hallucinatory dance. If the opener justifies its eleven minutes with a gripping evolution that creatively develops its initial ideas, the same cannot be said of other tracks, such as “The Mighty Atom Smasher”, ten minutes that rely far too heavily on groove and relegate arrangement and effects experiments to the margins, especially in its alien, alienating coda, or the overly long-winded “Demodex Invasion”, 19 minutes whose opening stretch struggles to justify itself in full and mostly serves as a prelude to a deafening minimalist explosion later remodulated into a long psychedelic bacchanal, a sort of post-industrial Sister Ray with an overlong coda.

The heavy-footed funk of “Mastodon Americanus” stitches together a tune bordering on the grotesque and the clownish, disturbed by electronic flare-ups, which naturally flows into the ten minutes of “City Heathen Dub”, reduced after a couple of minutes to a distant synth-bass and a cymbal groove before being rebuilt as a galactic funk, progressively more distorted. The nightmarish scenario of the debut, apparently abandoned, forcefully returns in the 14 minutes of “Narco Agent Vs. The Medicine Man”, an obsessive dub disturbed by menacing pulses, electronic slime, and mournful drones.

The second record, “Heavy Lids”, is decidedly more ambient and darker: “Evil Spirits/Angel Dust”, a full ten minutes long, is a menacing cosmic dirge made of sinister tollings; “Catatonia”, nearing 16 minutes, abandons the listener in a lifeless landscape full of menacing reverbs, with a vaguely jazzy drum loop set against the prevailing electronic miasmas, at least until the composition collapses into a galactic pulsation worthy of Klaus Schulze; “Needle Park”, another 11 minutes, slowed down until it deforms and dissolves into a smoky, otherworldly funk-jazz, leads into the even more formless “Red Sea”, 11 minutes of synths refracting through space, testing the listener's patience somewhat.

The wait has been long, but the reward is called “Cape Canaveral”, the culmination of the plunge into the abyss begun with the second record, with no rhythm left to serve as a guide. Long notes alternate in a boundless space, following a curious conception of time, instilling tension and anticipation in the listener's mind. It's an occult symphony, a boundless liturgy with few equals in terms of agonising beauty, among them the “fuochi fatui” of the aforementioned Klaus Schulze.

Babylon Seeker (1996) is a five-track EP spread over 47 minutes, a running time that for other artists would qualify as a proper album. The aggressive “Nerve Agent Vs. The Back Breaker” reconfigures Techno Animal as a big-beat project without entirely losing its industrial edge. The unsettling dub of “Zealot”, awash in reverb, becomes especially vivid in its beatless finale. “Sugar Ray” opts for a more mundane atmospheric techno, later hybridised with a more intricate rhythm and synth slime. The final part of the EP is taken up by the leaden “Heavy Water” and a livelier, (perhaps too) long remix of it.

The track that opens Phobic, another EP from 1997, is as close to a conventional song as the duo ever got: "The Myth/Illogical" could pass for a trip-hop tune if it didn't have a distorted beat and wasn't sung with the enthusiasm of a dying man. "Fistfunk" is essentially just a groove. "Toxicity" isn't much different, simply distorted to the point of becoming monstrous. Only the closing "Needle" returns to experimentation, toying with the turntable needle to warp the sound and distort time.

Also in 1998 comes the rarities compilations Radio Hades, nearly seventy minutes summing up the tendency to experiment with rhythms between dub and hip-hop that emerged after Re-Entry. Among the various tracks, the distorted, deafening tribalism of "Phantom Tribe" stands out as the boldest experiment.

These are often obsessive tracks, like "Bio Morphium" (by Techno Animal), or gloomy ones, like the shapeless "Phosporic" (by Porter Ricks). The standout episode is probably the one credited to the Berlin duo: the 13 minutes of "Ionic" are a breathtaking minimal-techno journey, built on frenetic rhythms and synths chasing each other endlessly, threatened by noise.

The deafening beat of "Caucasian Deathmask", with eardrum-splitting jazz horns, is an effective way to introduce a project that, even in the following "Escape The Earth", goes overboard on volume, warping the loops until they become unrecognizable and glitchy.

The more conventional industrial-hip-hop of "Substance X", which detonates into a final sonic disturbance, and "Low-Tech Predator", with threatening metal-guitar interventions, lead into the groove of "Anti-Matter", disrupted by whistles and reverb: these are tracks that entertain without surprising, a bit too long-winded given what they actually offer in terms of creativity. "Kamikaze Space Programme" could sum up much of the album in its eight minutes, with a hip-hop beat that gets swallowed by apocalyptic noise.

"Total Annihilation Of Self" opens with a terrifying assault, somewhere between harsh noise, breakcore, digital-hardcore and grindcore, but the following "Parasite" and "Iron Ghetto Man Crusher" are no less intense, with the latter brushing up against moments of extreme intensity, a point of no return leading to the most violent and annihilating cyber-grind. They also venture into a few miniature tracks, among which the mere 17 seconds of "The Myth Of Democracy" stand out, Napalm Death as reimagined in an industrial-noise hallucination.

The head-on impact of "Cruise Mode 101" is a matter of breathless rapping and a sound that drags Public Enemy into the middle of an industrial bombardment. The tense dub of "Glass Prism Enclosure", rapped but built around a more relaxed flow, naturally evolves into the circular groove of the instrumental "Hypertension", dominated by low frequencies, and leads into the slowed-down, hallucinatory beat of "DC-10", rapped by a voice that's warped, drenched in reverb or assailed by deafening noise. This opening quartet captures well the multifaceted nature of an album that can launch into rhythms that are, all things considered, danceable, only to blow them apart into scorching torrents of noise and distorted bass ("Robosapien"), can bury a catchy hook under a blanket of deafening sounds ("Freefall") and can work out squared-off, aggressive grooves ("Monoscopic") without giving up its taste for suffocating atmosphere, the loop as compositional core, and electronics as a blunt instrument to be used for dancing, terrifying or deafening depending on the moment.

In light of the wobble bass and the deconstructions of dance music that emerged in the following decade, The Brotherhood Of The Bomb has something visionary about it and seems to anticipate some of the coordinates of a music that in 2001 was still undefined and that, perhaps, it helped to shape. Even the role of the rappers, brought in alongside the veteran production duo, belongs more to the 2010s than to the start of the century.

The unsettling siren that opens "Piranha", with a frenetic rap carrying Caribbean overtones and a rhythmic assault between ferocious distortion and anguished synths, is a peak that nonetheless blends well with the album's final third, devastating too in the eardrum-splitting two-voice rap of "We Can Build You" and in the whirlpool of cyclopean, infernal funk that is "Blood Money".

Closed out by a breathtaking "Hell", driven by extreme intensity, The Brotherhood Of The Bomb brings the Techno Animal story to an end while actually pointing toward a direction that others would push all the way, such as Death Grips or clipping.

Not that Techno Animal were ever particularly easy listening, but the first part of the tracklist demands a lot of patience and rewards those who stick it out with a change of pace in the album's second half, faster and more adrenaline-fuelled, as well as instrumental. Here the duo returns more effectively to a blend of dub and industrial-hip-hop that represents a coherent follow-up to The Brotherhood Of The Bomb, without, of course, matching its originality.

By the time "S.O.S." comes around, we're back to the familiar mechanical clangs, synth slobber, and the usual compressed, distorted sounds. The tense pause of "Alien Within", a desolate, beatless dark-ambient piece, and the deafening drone of "Stargazer" sound, placed at the close, like postcards from after the Apocalypse.