UK-based dark electronic producer Jamie Blacker (aka ESA or Electronic Substance Abuse) first introduced his fusion of ferocious industrial rhythms and brooding soundscapes back in 2005 with his debut album on Hive Devotion, Discipline And Denial, a collection that placed him in similar sonic territory to that explored by fellow dark minds Stendeck and Autoclav1.1. This latest release on Tympanik Audio The Immaculate Manipulation offers up a remix companion to 2008’s The Sea & The Silence album, with 13 reworkings of tracks from that record by a range of remixers including C-Drone-Defect, Lights Out Asia, Access To Arasaka and the aforementioned Stendeck. It’s also easily the most straight out club-centred release I’ve heard from Tympanik in quite a while, with a large portion of the tracklisting here being firmly devoted towards 4/4 kickdrums and ferocious post-junglist breakbeats. That said however, it’s a slight pity that so much of the tracklisting here leans so much towards impressively produced but curiously generic psy-trance / contemporary EBM.
Indeed the likes of ESA’s own opening reworking of ‘I Am The Filth’ and Psilopsyb’s remix of ‘The Devil Worships Me’ manage to pack in so many hackneyed hardstyle and psytrance cliches that things pretty much verge on pure parody once the scary processed vocals drop in (“The devil is inside me…and now I am inside youâ€) alongside a headspinning mass of stuttering false endings. While a fair swag of the material on offer here appears firmly geared towards goth-y dancefloors, it’s with the more leftfield inclined reworkings that many of the biggest highlights appear here. Intoner’s searing remix of ‘The Drawbacks Of Sleeping In Silence’ offers up a crunching fusion of serrated breakcore rhythms and chunky metal guitar sludge that calls to mind some meeting point between Godflesh and Sickboy, while Marching Dynamics’ reworking of ‘Tasting Nails’ see things sliding off into a lulling fugue of dubby breakbeats and Middle Eastern-tinged samples that suggests Meat Beat Manifesto’s echo chamber-laden crawl. Access To Arasaka’s remix of ‘Your Anger Is A Gift’s also manages to provide plenty of thrills here with its dextrous slide down into contorted, meticulously detailed breakbeat IDM, calling to mind one of Richard Devine’s more thorny landscapes. While a fair chunk of the tracklisting is likely to appeal predominantly towards fans of club-centred industrial / EBM dance, those looking for less obvious styles should still find much to like here.
Chris Downton
