Search - Various Artists :: Drum Machinegun

Like having the musical sh-t kicked out of you.

Aquarius Records | San Francisco | 07/23/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The humble drum machine. It's had a tumultuous existence, equally loathed and loved, no more so than in metal (where for the most part it tends to be loathed). Without it, there's be no techno, or hip hop, or grime or industrial music. Or maybe there would be, but it would sound drastically different. It opened up a whole new world of sound, allowing musicians to program beats and sounds that they couldn't necessarily play or make themselves. So it was only a matter of time before extreme musicians discovered the sort of speed and brutality one could wring from that little box. It's nothing new, metal bands, grind bands and the like have been using drum machines for ages, but as extreme music gets more aggressive, more f-cked up, more complex and more extreme, folks making this sort of music are pushing the limits of what a drum machine can do. Before, a band couldn't be any faster than their drummer could play. Now there is no limit, 100 bpm, 200 bpm, 300 bpm or more, speed is now no longer an issue. Nor is arrangement. Now a deft drum machine programmer can fit millions of beats and an insane number of different rhythms into a one minute song. Faster, more furious, more freaked out, I love it.



From the murky blackened dizzyingly complex mechanical drums of black metal outfits like Draugar, to the pounding industrial grooves of Godflesh, to the lightning fast blasts of Agoraphobic Nosebleed, I can't get enough, I love the sputtering stuttering pounding skittering drum machine. Not as a replacement for real drums, and a real drummer (lord knows that usually the best part of seeing a band live is seeing a kicka-- drummer totally destroy) but as another tool in the already formidable arsenal.

So here we have Drum>MachineGun, an audio report on the current state of grind. And metal. And more specifically, just what these grindmetal freaks are doing with their drum machines.



And what they're doing is totally f-cking mind blowing and face melting and completely confounding. Forget about music you think is fast, or heavy, or complicated, or freaked out, or f-cked up. Because whatever you think, these songs, and these bands are more. Much more. 20 bands playing 67 songs in 73 minutes. Average song length about a minute. Average number of parts per song? More than our puny minds can handle. If you could imagine the most insane, most complicated, heaviest weirdest grindmetal band in the world, this comp is the record they would make. Each band linked in some ways, sometimes obviously, sometimes not so. But it makes for an incredibly cohesive listen. Which is rare for comps in general, especially one with 20 bands and almost 70 songs.



Probably my favorite discovery amongst the bunch is Noism, who might possibly be my new favorite band. Imagine a group that sounded like a skipping Pig Destroyer cd. Or like multiple Agoraphobic Nosebleed cds playing at the same time. A totally mind blowing freaked out shredfest, impossibly convoluted rhythms, bizarre and brutal riffage, splattered all over the place, but sometimes lopping and skipping into bizarre industrial metal breakdowns, like a death metal Oval or something. Drum patterns that are mind blowingly complex, and chugging squiggly guitars that somehow sync up perfectly. It's like a super scratched up, skipping grindcore 45, played at 90 rpm. I am dying for more than these 5 minutes.



Then there's Jet Jaguar Kr3 Kill Spree, maybe the weirdest of the bunch. Imagine any of the other bands on this comp, having their blasting grind picked apart, chopped into tiny pieces and then flung haphazardly into a swirling black froth by V/VM or someone equally demented. An industrialized black metal music concrete. There are riffs and harsh vocals and all that but they are scattered amidst all sorts of bizarre sounds, damaged FX, and random looped samples. Some familiar AQ faves are present as well as a whole bunch of bands I'd never even heard of but were immediately blown away by. On the familiar side, BIG faves Black Mayonnaise, who I hadn't really expected to find on this comp, but they do indeed employ the machine made drums, although BM use them much differently. A sludgy ambient freaked out drug dirge world of f-cked up home recorded doom. Noxious ambience, dense clouds of grinding guitar grrr and swooping FX drenched synths, all over a relentlessly pounding simple machine made beat. Like Hawkwind with a drum machine, or a super blissed out on-the-nod Butthole Surfers, a deliriously dark lugubrious creepy crawl. And no drum machine grind comp would be complete without Agoraphobic Nosebleed, the patron saints of mechanical grind, the lords of drum machine destruction. A technical grind metal juggernaut, who choose to instead indulge their industrial techno jones here, spewing forth a thick wash of pounding doom drenched gabber, with creepy vocal snippets, whirling clouds of synth fuzz and lo-fi hiss, all over a relentless 4/4 pound. Then there's Nemo, who I last heard from years ago on a split cd released by the now defunct Rage Of Achilles label. And I went absolutely apesh-t for their new wave video game death metal grind. Wishing for a full length that never came. Thankfully not much has changed. If anything, they've gotten weirder and faster and more f-cked up. It's like classic eighties metal chopped up and sped up, splattered with drum machines, run through some 16 bit video game system, and then performed by some grind metal super group. Yowza!



On the new to us side of things, there's Mecha Bongzilla, who I'm tempted to believe is Bongzilla's faster, less stoned alterego, but it's a bit hard to tell. One track is downtuned buzzing blurry techgrind, but with INSANE vocals, like some alien gargling with a mouthful of kazoos and croaking frogs. Although their other track is downright sludgy and doomy so who knows? Also, Mad Cow who spit out weird echoey blast beats and spastic rhythmic splatter underneath thick sheets of low end guitar grind and super f-cked black vomit vocals. Oh and a bunch of bird calls, monkey sounds, and a totally bizarre sped up super affected Elizabeth Clare Prophet sample right in the middle!!!! Woah!



Ok, it'll probably be easier to go through the rest of the bands in list form:



Artificial Intelligence Agency: more of a strange series of interludes, mostly weird sound effects, movie snippets, found sounds, bizarre FX, and only the occasional bit of music, and it's NOT metal, more some sort of weird ambient porno funk.



Voltron: chugging super fast gurgling vocalled death metal grind, with guitars and vocals so indistinct they are just blurs of low end sound and of course lightning fast drum machine blasts.



Submachine Drum: murky lo-fi industrial grind, so fast it's all a dizzying blur of hyperspeed drums and looped processed guitar riffs.



Slough: Not related to the similarly named Slough Feg... and take away the Feg and you've got a guttural grindmetal shred fest. Impossibly downtuned guitars, all a growing gurgling blur.



Scumfusion: some seriously shredding grind, but with plenty of wheedily lead guitars, grinding sludge metal riffs over ridiculously fast rhythms and super weird processed vocals, that sound like some underwater alien. Surprisingly melodic, but still furious and fierce, pounding and pummeling.



Prosthetic C-nt: I reviewed these guys' full length ages ago, a gleefully perverse and sick sick sick take on ultragrossoutgrind. Super blown out guitars and a drummachine cranked to 11 and programmed at about 300 BPM. And of course lots of goofy movie samples.



Ocrilim: No comp of insanely technical grind would be complete without some Mick Barr madness. Ocrilim is Barr (Orthrelm, Octis, Crom Tech) shredding wildly to sputtering spastic machine drums. SO insanely inspired but incredibly hard on the ears. In a good way.



Nerve Not Found: Prog gone grind. Keyboards swoop in and out of super complicated arrangements. Like the Locust covering Magma.



Hellz Army: Pounding DHR style industrial gabber. Big static repeating guitar riffs and pounding four on the floor drum machine pummel with bizarre samples of fifties rock, Space Ghost and tons of other random weirdness.



Genghis Tron: I sure do love these guys. Imagine Slayer sped up to impossible speeds, a grinding super technical satanic death metal, then mix in a bunch of fuzzed out new wave synths, hip hop breakbeats, samples and prepare to have your mind melt.



Decomposing Serenity: These guys represent the old school. Super blow out death metal gore grind. Downtuned riffing, chugging guitars, machine made blast beats, and a vast array of gurgling, strangled, alien, monster growls. Bits of this are almost even funky, making them sound at times like a gore grind Chili Peppers.



Data Clast: Another grind new wave hybrid, but with a bit of a prog bent. Heavy and super pummeling but with plenty of thick fuzzy synths, and convoluted song structures, complex arrangements, and processed guitars that skip and stutter as much as they riff. And of course some huge slow and low grumbling monster gurgle vocals.



Cocoon: Stretched out industrial black ambience, one of the few tracks whose drum machines are more a part of their whole vibe than the driving focal point. Crackling, rumbling drones, clouds of drifting glitch, and shuffling stuttering rhythms, an ominous dreamlike subtly drum machined drift.



This is the kind of record that leaves you bruised and bloody, beaten and exhausted. Like having the musical sh-t kicked out of you. This is a seriously intense bout of heavy listening. Hard listening. Nothing easy about this at all. Super furious, totally relentless, loud as f-ck, faster than a speeding bullet, grinding and gurgling and bellowing and blasting and skipping and looping and crushing and pulverizing and pummeling and shrieking and shredding and so godd-mn amazing."

Vital Weekly review

Craig N. | Indiana | 06/27/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"DRUM MACHINE GUN (CD By Relapse)

This is what you get when you cross Fantomas with death metal and use extreme software editing techniques. Drum Machine Gun is one of the most interesting albums I have come across in a long time. It's fast, ever-changing, brutal, experimental and sometimes humorous because of certain movie samples used. It is a compilation of artists but remains a cohesive release of unique extreme music. Forget about deciphering any of the

vocals, as they sound like a rapid delivery of down tuned belching. At 74 minutes, the album can become overbearing. I would suggest listening to it in brief chunks to avoid becoming overly sensitized. It is by far one of the most unique albums I have heard from Relapse."