Parisian electronic producer / visual artist Raoul Sinier managed to up the anticipation levels surrounding this third album “Brain Kitchen’ with his recent “Huge Samurai Radish’ EP, which featured several tracks from this full-length release as well as remixes from the likes of Wisp, Datach’I and Vast Aire. While “Huge Samurai Radish’ showed the mutant IDM hiphop structures explored previously by Sinier as Ra on his preceding excellent “Wxfdswxc2′ album for the sadly now-defunct Sublight label firmly in evidence however, as the numerous tweaked-out Youtube previews suggested, “Brain Kitchen’ is a considerably different sort of beast. Opening track “Intro 3′ certainly hints at this from the very outset, with ominous distorted bass chords and distant thunderclap beats giving way to a crunching mass of overdriven, almost prog-rock synth arpeggios and as vast wall of crashing rock drums, which gradually get tweaked and DSP-manipulated to truly headscrambling levels.
“Listen Close’ proves no less frenetic, with bitscrambled sampled chatter ala Amon Tobin’ “Verbal’ being scattered through a backdrop of corkscrewing rhythms atop some curious placid-sounding noodly synths, but it’s “King Frog’ that offers up one of the first real surprises here, with pretty much the closest thing Sinier’ attempted to date to a straightforward club track, albeit one where the 4/4 house kicks and soul/jazz chords slowly get mashed and pitch-shifted down into a crawling, hypnotic slices of glitch-blues complete with Sinier’ own backing vocals. The noodly, distorted analogue synths make a reappearance on the contorted “Whalemen’, which sits somewhere between one of Prefuse 73′ particularly flexing beat workouts and a Goblin Dario Argento film score, while “The Incredible Spitting Machine’ sees all manner of plosive utterances being resculpted into a barrage of breakcore rhythms beneath some curiously ambient-inclined synth-pads, shortly before things descend into an insane whirl of timestretching and wild rock stylings. While I felt that there were points here where Sinier could have perhaps eased back on the constant meticulous digital manipulation, in favour of allowing a more restrained sense of atmosphere to build, “Brain Kitchen’ should please those left excited by his “Huge Samurai Radish’ appetiser EP.
