Swarm Intelligence – Rust

Can we praise Ad Noiseam some more?  At this point it would be so redundant our focus keyword ratio for the label would explode Google searches and become the only thing that appears, regardless of what you want to find.  Tamarind caloric content?  Sorry, Ad Noiseam’s going to come up, because we talk about them so much.  Well, yet again, we received another stellar promo package from the guy, but sadly some of it was too popular for what we normally review.  Do not forget, ye of the underground, we prefer to review things that have a lower following, anything above 10,000 fans already has enough drool dripping all over it like a baby’s bib, so what use is it to have our tongues adding to that slathering mass of stickiness?  Does it really matter if some weirdo site gives it yet another positive review?  Pfff, like you guys read our crap anyway, we know you click on the link, go straight to the score, and then decide if you want to hit the play button or not.  But this one time, please, other than ignoring our ranting about Ad Noiseam, take a little time to investigate all that is Swarm Intelligence, because he’s doing great things with the rusted remains of industrial.  Also, Ad Noiseam doesn’t screw around with his releases, ever.

  

So Swarm Intelligence, yeah we’ve actually heard him before.  In fact, he released his first one with Ad Noiseam, titled Faction, in 2014, but it was a little too old for us to review by the time we received it.  Coming from Berlin, the land from which all industrial stemmed, he knew exactly what he was doing, fusing old trve human-and-machine pounding with techno and newer noise movements in Germany.  Considering he was building his structures on musical tastes that died out in the early 2000s, or at least to everyone but industriellubermenschen, because just gotta justify those cyberloks, it was no easy task to make it vibrant again, to give it the new life it required.  Like all of the bands on this label, however, Swarm Intelligence is not simplicity, so if anyone he was the one to do it.  If you like your beats to carry the tempo of your mother’s heart in the womb, why not just go back in there you baby?  Too simple for us, we like it complex, in either structure or idea, or both. This is mainly in idea.

 

And as an idea it’s a testament to the old and the new.  Swarm Intelligence, in Rust, has sought to return to the absolute roots of industrial.  That would be, listen now, pay attention, industry.  For this particular release, he spent countless hours around abandoned factories, power stations, as well as collecting found objects made of metal, making it very clear with the symbolic cover art what he was trying to do.  With these elements he then created source recordings, some manipulated to make them more organic, some left as discovered with small alterations, in order to build the Five Year Plan that is Rust.  Earlier work by Swarm Intelligence, such as On the Edge, was rather basic in its approach to electronica.  At this point, however, he’s far beyond that, he’s learned to explore, but not merely explore he also analyzes.  He digs into his sources and pulls their forth their essence out of corruption, like a form of musical repurposing.  One can imagine the process of looking through forgotten industry, running his fingers over all the corrosion and dilapidation to find pieces and places that would seem like meaningless scrap to the unskilled.  He’s given new life to a genre literally and symbolically, drawing forth permanence from what seems a void and fusing it with delicate beats and complex electronics, which in turn creates a rich listening experience.  The only complaint that could possibly be made, in comparison to his last release especially, is Rust is more of artistic expression than music at times, since he’s restricted himself to a specific mode of creation.  However, in spite of this, the amount of variation is impressive and makes one wish more musicians would do for industrial what the original creators of the genre intended.

 

Swarm Intelligence Official Facebook

Written by Stanley Stepanic

Swarm Intelligence: Rust
Ad Noiseam
4.6 / 5