Gore Tech – Futurphobia
Man, ever just want to drop some damn bass? Ever want to hear that low-end rumble pulsing through your organs and causing a hemorrhage? Ever just want to pump up that system and blow your speakers, driving around mall parking lots for some nightmare on bass street? Stalk with that bass, assault with that bass, dominate with that bass. Sound good? Yeah. The problem is most people play the same old bass, that stank bass that doesn’t have much behind it, it’s just bass. We need some real bass around here, the kind of bass that scares the soul out of any onlookers who happen to unfortunately be near the car. Bass with sounds of warped, dying technology behind it, “the glitch”, and other such things that turn your system into something like a steel factory churning out girders made only from bass, poured from straight molten bass from melted-down amateur meme grippers. What kind of bass would that be? Drum and bass, but only if it comes from a label like Ad Noiseam, which has been absolutely killing it over the past few years. We get promo packages from him from time to time, and though we’d love to review every single one of them, we only have so much time and space, plus we need to give due to other folks.
Gore Tech is a one man factory, real name of George Flett, who started this project roughly three years ago to promote the beauty of cyberpunk and dystopias through degraded technological bursts influenced by old school breakcore and drum and bass. He wears a beard, a real beard. It will be worn years from now, when all of the poseurs wearing beards realize they haven’t the face for it, nor the gumption. Gore Tech wears his beard, he’s the foreman of the bass factory, commanding his legions as ingot after ingot is pounded into pure bass mechanics, and if they falter, if they’re weak, well he’ll do it himself, taking a sledge in either arm and pounding that music into oblivion, as Futurphobia proves with little effort.
This was a good one. So good it caused our one-week-old daughter’s eyes to open in wonder (totally true story). Behind those eyes was the recognition that the future, though bleak, though crumbling, has some good left in it. Gore Tech lays it all out, and by ‘it’ we mean “the bass”. Futurphobia absolutely crushes, opening with a technological soundscape preparing the listener for the thematic direction; pounding, supreme bass, bass so loud even if you have the bass off you’re still going to hear it. But his mastery of the bass is not simply within the realm of production, he knows how to work his sound with multiple layers so though the bass is there, it’s not the primary focus, merely the king among lower aristocrats. He works quite heavily with some glitchy patterns that break the flow, but the sweet rumble behind it all is addicting. In addition, he goes through all the expected mechanical techniques, but throws in a ton of startling turns and manipulations of the usual style into something original. Not so easy to do in a genre that relies primarily on drum and bass, thus its name. This is the new drum and bass, the future, and the end. There is no other.
Written by Stanley Stepanic
Gore Tech: Futurphobia
Ad Noiseam
4.7 / 5
