Zentriert ins Antlitz: ...no!
Tympanik Audio

Zentriert ins Antlitz members Holger Meuler, Jürgen Warkentin, and Marc Friedrich have found the perfect home on Tympanik Audio as the group's industrial-inflected electronica fits the label like a glove. The trio's music oozes dark portent and claustrophobic malice in its mix of filmic voice samples, percolating beat patterns, and symphonic strings. Immaculate on production grounds, ...no! delivers pretty much what one might expect: a wide-ranging, epic travelogue that encompasses a broad range of stylistic settings, with all of them infected with a kindred funeral spirit. The overture “Phreneticus” weaves industrial beats through a landscape of spectral wails, “Today” couples deranged voices and the supplications of a male tenor with viral synth swarm and violent clanking noises, “Perphenazin” pushes the group's sound into exotic territory by marrying Middle Eastern string plucks with a pummeling acid-electro beat structure, and, not surprisingly, “The Final Walk” ends the album on a brooding note. The album also includes stomping industrial-acid-techno (“Cant Get Me”), epic workouts (nine minutes of epic electronic snarl in “Manage My Sensibility”), eerie soundscaping (“…No”), and the occasional interlude (“The Animals Hanging”). Hard-core Zentriert ins Antlitz fans will want to know that the seventy-two-minute, twelve-track album, ...no! actually comes with extra material—two “demutilated” discs featuring bonus tracks and remixes by fellow Tympanik Audio artists such as Subheim, Integral, Lucidstatic, Disharmony, Autoclav1.1, among others—that can be accessed by following instructions included on the digi-pack's inner sleeve.

February 2009