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Gore Tech: Futurphobia
Ad Noiseam

It would be hard to imagine a more dystopian title than Futurphobia, and sure enough Gore Tech's follow-up to his 2013 EP Machine Throne is a harrowing ride indeed. But anyone conversant with the breakcore genre shouldn't come to the fifty-minute collection expecting anything else than what the Berlin-based producer delivers: thunderous breakcore tracks seething with hellacious intent. Futurphobia, incidentally, is available in two formats: as a translucent orange vinyl pressing featuring the six new tracks, and as a CD that supplements those six with five more, three of them previously issued on Gore Tech's Ad Noiseam debut EP. Yet while it would naturally be located in the breakcore section of your hypothetical record store, Futurphobia isn't one-dimensional: Gore Tech mixes things up by opening the set with “>_Run (William Gibson),” which includes excerpts from Neuromancer read by the author himself, plus collaborations with Hecq (Ben Lukas Boysen, who also mixed the release) and Machinecode.

Wasting no time at all, a palpable sense of dread is established by the Gibson-related track with its distorted voiceover and foreboding synth smears, after which the nightmarish “The Zerofinity Event” rolls out the heavy artillery for the first of many hard-hitting tracks. Dubwise atmospherics introduce “Optical Hybrid” before the cut morphs into one of those punishing, seizure-gripped throwdowns so characteristic of the breakcore genre. Consistent with the album's dystopic spirit, a heavy industrial quality pervades a number of tracks, “Organica” and “In Exilium” among them. Playing with others doesn't appear to lighten Gore Tech's mood either: the Hecq collaboration “Mechanica” is as heavy as anything else on the album, and Gore Tech's rework of Machinecode's “Stems” snarls venomously, too.

Some cuts push breakcore insanity to its seeming limit. Buried within the furious shredding of “The Ghost Particle,” “Dubwar,” and “The Plague of Zion” (the ones previously featured on Machine Throne) are mangled voices of various kinds, though they sometimes vanish when the grinding rhythms and clattering snares around them create such a torrential ruckus. Newly created material such as “Hex Spectrum” and “Optical Hybrid” shows Gore Tech clearly hasn't mellowed since the EP's production, and one can only begin to imagine the awesome experience it would be hearing such material live. It ain't subtle, but it sure is powerful.

June 2015