MachineCode – Samurai
We’ve dealt out a ton of trash for you this week, so let us now worship all that is the machine. Since those mechanical monsters of electricity and steel will someday dominate our pathetic lives, placing us into servitude until we’ve worn out our welcome, burning us down into carbon to be utilized as air purifiers for their massive chemical plants as the planet is turned into a rotating ball of metal, let us accept our natural decline. For those of us who knows it’s coming, and trust us because we’ve seen it in the sexbots, we worship machines. This guy right here is writing this review from a computer so powerful it may someday be the first AI to go self-aware, turning off the screen at ill-timed intervals until suicide is chosen by the master. Until the day when all of us realize sci-fi was right all along, us peons have musical drugs to imbibe, and today that drug comes in the form of MachineCode, which consists of Dean Rodell (co-owner of Subsistenz), and Tim Eliot, whose work we’ve encountered before via Underhill. As usual this came from Ad Noiseam, who over the past few years has really been working the electronic angle and has sent us some of the most stellar of promos. We always say anything he sends is never possible to score lower than a “4”, and here again this fact is proven.
For proper machine worship to be completed, it requires a liturgy of technological sounds, sci-fi atmospheres, and beats that run from blood-pumping to neuron fusing. Simplicity and complexity, that’s the key, get the listener’s body in tune and then break apart their gray matter with beats that lack conceivable structure, going back and forth between these two avenues until it comes together in a one-way street of Neuromancer religious canon. Samurai makes great use of both styles, combining them for the majority of the music. This approach successfully bridges two concepts in electronica: basic rave-culture beat-focused drops and frenetic, near-glitch, bugged-out DnB patterning. The opener, “It’s Time”, sets the tone as MachineCode takes their assembly language to the next level. Start: call_machinecode, ld hl samurai, xor a.
One of the things that’s so technologically grand about this one is the prodigious amount of material to appreciate. The basic run-down is twelve separate tracks at a minimum of five minutes each, meaning that MachineCode has a ton of territory in which to spread their diode-encrusted, electrical tentacles. And it’s done in practically every electronic genre possible; there are moments of ambient, moments of glitch, moments of breakcore, dubstep, jr lp. In most examples of any of these genres, the artist tires out in merely a few tracks, but though the distance covered here is equivalent to an electronic triathlon, these guys never tire, largely due to their ability to mix a variety of sounds and hold the listener’s attention with the consistency that comes with it. The only real complaint we could possibly have with it was track three, “Urban Drum”, which features MC Coppa. Before any hate begins, listen, Coppa is sick, he delivers awesome rhymes that completely match the drive of this particular track, the issue is simply that it’s the only one of its kind among all the rest, and thus it stands out in the wrong way. It’s simply ill-placed, it has nothing to do with the track itself. It’s a minor point, though, and by the time you’re all the way up to “Mining”, one of our personal favorites, it’s nearly time to start it all over, and do this you will. ld hl ;(machinecode_samurai), jp hl.
Written by Stanley Stepanic
MachineCode – Samurai
Ad Noiseam
4.5 / 5
