IGLOOMAG.com's REVIEW by MARK TEPPO
Pietro Da Sacco | 01/05/2006
(4 out of 5 stars)
"IGLOOMAG.com review by MARK TEPPO:
(01.05.06) Scanalyzer began as a "I dare you" project between Chris Randall (Sister Machine Gun, Micronaut) and Wade Allin (Atomica, Christ Analogue), each man slapping the other with a dirty gauntlet, offering the challenge to make musical mayhem. On The One And The Zero is the result: their collaborative efforts at making a noise record. But it isn't really a "noise" record, oh no, not in the Merzbow sense -- filled with sheets of screaming static and tearing metal -- or that it is a Winterkälte record -- sixty minutes of shrieking beats intent on reducing your brain to a soup of loose neurons; On The One And The Zero is Randall and Allin laying bare their love for the metallic clatter of EinstÜrzende Neubauten, their inner furor for Squarepusher beat collisions and their nascent tumescence for glitch and static-pop. They've made a record of junkyard funk, a fusion of synth-pop (sans such ephemeral nonsense as lyrics) and machine noise that beats with just a jackhammer fury that it sweats viscous oil.
Opening salvo "Moretech" can't resist the Randall-style funk that pervades his Micronaut records, even as it whistles with a scree of white noise and over-stimulated beats. It's still a dance track, albeit one filled with caustic backblasts of beats and synthesizer melodies DSP-ed into electrified whirlygigs of frenzied motion. "Screamer" finds a human voice in the distorted wail of a siren, an elongated ululation which struggles to free itself from a bruising maelstrom of bubbling and blasting noise. "Neutron Dub" contains a calm moment in the furious storm of the record: hiding between calamitous fusions of heavy drums and searing synthesizers is a small Speak 'n' Spell verse with patient glitch programming -- a tiny oasis of dubbed out mechanical words that tries to whisper the secret phrases which make the boilers hum before the return of the heavy stomp of the pistons. "Monotreme" -- the closest the record comes to an ambient track -- churns with grandiose motion, a sluggish whirlwind of sound that plays out as the soundtrack for a time-lapse formation of fractal machinery on the surface of a dead world. The first interstitial "Zwischenspiel" is a sound loop caught in a cyclotron, spun hard and kicked out the other side as a half-formed Teutonic floor burner that is kicked into a rack of CPUs where it is thrashed and stretched into a slithering rhythm-meister -- the shattered howl of "Scan7" -- all decked out with an over-abundance of reverb and the slick metallic kiss of a rolling kick-drum.
There are four "Zwischenspiel" tracks, each lasting not more than a minute and acting as interesting transitional elements. "Zwei" is a recorded voice intoning some sage advice in German before it is stabbed to death by the shiny beats of "Herstius." "Drei" shops in Mothboy territory (that dark-hop terrain not quite subterranean enough to be Scorn), looking for a wicked sub-basement beat and a fragile handclap to layer across a tender piano melody before being savaged by the galloping heartbeat of "One Seventy Five." They all came to sad ends, these "Zwischenspiel" tracks, though "Vier" is my favorite for its scattered scan through the radio dial. "Vier" sums up the thematic thrust of On The One And The Zero: ideas considered, hammered into shape by the addition of beats and static, caught up in a funk of their own electrified valances, and then discarded in a rush of white noise so as to be grist for the next pattern assembly.
"Screenblitter," the final track, inadvertently shows its naked belly to me. Sounding a great deal like a remixed version of Micronaut's "Perdition" (sans lyrics of course), "Screenblitter" doesn't come off as a cheap moment of recycling, but rather as Randall and Allin applying new techniques to what they've done in the past. They're looking for fresh nuances and new textures in the folds of the old by applying fresh patches and futuristic mods. They're making a new world out of the metal and plastics of the old. It's a noisy future, partly because of all the audio damage they're causing in the studio. Scanalyzer is the sound of the free underground radio stations of the next generation: built in the basement, mastered in the kitchen and blasted into the ether by a hand-made transmitter hidden out behind the tool shed. Raw, noisy, and sure to raise blisters on your lips as you kiss your speakers."
Track Listings (15) - Disc #1