Search - Alec Empire :: Futurist

"Empire has tapped into something vital, dangerous, and all-too-absent from so much rock music today ... this isn't the death of rock `n' roll but a blasting, needle-in-the-red affirmation of its power. Turn it up." - KERRANG "Simply a great punk rock record." - TERRORIZER "Empire's keen intelligence ... blazes through every track in a merciless assault on apathy that's also strangely optimistic, like a dove bearing a petrol bomb. The revolution may not be televised, but it's definitely been soundtracked." - NME "While he may not be Atari or teenage anymore, Alec Empire is still running riot. This is guitar-heavy industrial punk aggression - some of the most forceful music Empire has written since the ATR breakthrough Future of War album - over which he pours forth disquisition and diatribe, railing against totalitarianism and authority in all its guises." - ROCKSOUND Alec Empire is many things to many people: a man with an extraordinary recording history, the musical revolutionary behind avant-garde noise-punk outfit Atari Teenage Riot, an electronic music experimentalist who has made records on a Gameboy, and a consummate musician who has worked with an extraordinarily broad range of peers. He has remixed artists as diverse as blues legend R.L. Burnside, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, Björk, Rob Zombie, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Slayer, Einstürzende Neubauten, and members of the new hip-hop generation like Company Flow and Prince Paul's Handsome Boy Modeling School. He has toured with Rage Against the Machine, Wu-Tang Clan, Beck, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails. Alec Empire's new album, Futurist, is the most fully integrated vision of his twenty-first century rebellion yet. A blistering alliance of primitive punk fury and advanced technological overload, Futurist heralds the return of the guitar to the center of Empire's musical vision. The characteristic shockwave aggression of his previous outings is still channeled for maximum impact, but the gun-to-temple blasts of tracks like "Gotta Get Out" and "Vertigo" deliver their powder-keg payloads with a newly discovered blood rush of excitement. Futurist is the most brutally uplifting Empire has ever sounded.