Articles
2011 10 Favourite Labels
Spotlight 3

Albums
Félicia Atkinson
Autistici
Bee Mask
Biomass
Gui Boratto
Peter Broderick
Benjamin Broening
bvdub
Chicago Odense Ens.
Dday One
Lawrence English
The Field
Nils Frahm
Douglas Greed
Jim Haynes
Hess + McFall
High aura'd
Hior Chronik
itsnotyouitsme
King Midas Sound
Leyland Kirby
Knox & Oberland
Koss/Henriksson/Mullaert
Tom Lawrence
Mist
Phonte
Planetary Assault Systems
Rustie
Sense
Sepalcure
Slove
Splashgirl
Two People In A Room
Vaetxh
Christina Vantzou
Marius Vareid
Wolfgang Voigt
Water Borders
Wenngren & Bissonnette
Xhin
Eisuke Yanagisawa
yMusic

Compilations / Mixes
Above The City
Air Texture Vol. 1
Burning Palms
Emerging Organisms 4
Live And Remastered

EPs
Antonymes/ S. D. Society
Cardopusher
Cyrus
Gulls
Keepsakes
Late Night Chronicles
Old Apparatus
Option Command
Pillowdiver
Benoît Honoré Pioulard
Kevin Reynolds
Strategy

Biomass: Energy
Biometrax

Some synthesizer-based albums pulsate; others churn. Biometrax's debut release, Energy, an hour-long and aptly titled collection issued by Walter Douglas (aka Walter ovtha woodz) under the Biomass alias, is definitely in the latter category. The album is a multi-dimensional explosion of radioactive electrosonics that arrives two decades after Douglas initiated his Biomass audio experiments in Los Angeles, California.

The initial tracks, the overture “Soar Acido” and “Serpent Sphinx,” initiate the deeper plunge taken by the album as it develops, with the subsequent tracks growing longer and even more uncompromising in their furious attack. Initially “Phaseloc” more percolates than pulsates, and there's even a dub-like quality in the ricocheting effects that briefly appear but that all changes when they're washed away by a massive bank of churning synthesizer patterns. A techno heart beats at the locomotive center of “Aquapolar” though you'll have to listen hard to detect it beneath the pummeling storms of synthetic fire that thrash throughout its ten-minute running time. Despite the ultra-modern glow of the music's sleek surfaces, there's a tribal character at work too, specifically in the rhythms that push the material forward at such a breakneck pace, and it's here where the industrial dimension of the Biomass equation resides. That tribal element emerges a number of times but never more so than during the closing “Minechamber,” which at first suggests it might be twenty-two minutes of cavernous and reverb-drenched dark ambient until a pounding drum pattern surfaces five minutes in to help propel the material forward. The piece comes across like the accompaniment to some violent ritual of the kind it's probably best not to know more about.

November 2011