Essence Implosion! is the beast, cut belly to back to belly, twisted and pulled, stretching like a slinky, and losing its entrails and everything in the process. (As if the original New Slaves wasn’t gruesome enough for you.) Aptly titled, the follow up to 2010’s album-of-the-year is not merely a “remix” album, despite what the details imply. One almost wishes those cursory details didn’t exist for fear they would suggest this as bypassable; a novelty; a throwaway. Of course, those conclusions couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, though, the source material here is mined from that great and singular beast: New Slaves. However, indentifying those samples amidst the tectonic grumbling of Essence Implosion! is messy, approximating to picking through, by hand, the chaotic viscera twisted out of the beast. Like its predecessor – and very much unlike its predecessor – New Slaves II burrows into various guises, each equally maddening, each tied to the first with threads of muscle, each peppered with rust and grind. It’s a pretty grin-inducing affair and a wonderful compliment to the astoundingly versatile Zs album it apes.
Zs New Slaves
(2010, Social Registry)
RIYL = Aufgehoben, Kingdom Shore, Steve Reich
Zs is a unit of irregulars trained for piloting costumes of beastliness. New Slaves, their grand opera. It is the documentation of three costumings, mechanized, and of particular weight, with various sub-beastly machinery in tow. Part 1: “Concert Black” to “Masonry” – the first five installments find the troupes operating a web of interconnected brutes, partly organic, partly motorized, five dirge missives, jaws agape, wide shoulders and variously noisy purrs. This is the infantry. A list of monstrousness. Tattered with ballistics gone awry, but still functional, with a limp. “Acres of Skin” is perhaps the lead puppet in this procession, trailing bones of all the animals of Noah. Propelled, percussive. Part one is the initial assault to crumble the walls, the larger buildings, to set metal into the dirt and rearrange the livestock. Part 2: “New Slaves” – a single animal. Twenty minutes in length and height and width. The toil of Zs. Perhaps taller and lengthier than its timeframe. The engine. “New Slaves” is a series of multilateral parts pumping in conjunction, the bulldoze, correcting and reassembling part 1. Smoke is high in the air now, seen from miles. “New Slaves” is that new grind. Count the number of arms, the number of legs, tracks of tanks. An evolutionary force, part 2 is the flex and return, the new homemaking of charred marrow and bits of yellowed grass. Perhaps increasingly mechanized, but a distortion of mechanics. A perfunctory loop of mock celebrations and their loud wrist watches. The certain death and the certain intelligence of a cricked neck. Part 3: “Black Crow Ceremony,” parts one and two – the aftermath. These costumes tend more towards linens and ropes, lettuce, twigs, all in gallons of gasoline. Twin burnouts for the ghostly set, a mix of specters and the dismembered arms part 2. A milky ambience for the regiment of red-eyed drunkenness. Loosens the blood, though not without the fleshy mandibles and teeth of goats. Minotaurs circle these creatures warily. Two sentinel the after-Zs. Prepared by the shifts in the air. Part 3 is the shifts in the air that lift from the chaos. Collect your things. It’s time to go. The imperfect triptych, an immaculate corpse of sorts. Though not remotely similar to anything else you’ll hear this year, New Slaves is among the very best that sound has to offer this year, this new decade, this past century? The most concentrated aural workout I’ve had since, since…
Gang Gang Dance Saint Dymphna
(The Social Registry, 2008)
The audacity of Saint Dymphna gets me every time. Following up their experimentally raw (and also super terrific) God’s Money with this polyrythmic dance/hip-hop album was a genious move that has garnered them the lime light that their contemporaries (Animal Collective, Black Dice) have been reaping for a long while.
