Review: Dead Neanderthals + Machinefabriek - DNMF

DNMF should not be. It’s too heavy to be airborne, and yet there it is – a thick sack of tones with a demented fox for a mouth, leaving the ground under the command of one solitary drum. It’s a slow and agonising process, and the feedback and drones appear to bloat and stretch as they rise, tugged back down as gravity attempts to re-assert itself, like a moist bag set to split and spill its contents. As the upward force intensifies, the fabric of my earthly reality begins to tear; saxophone squeals into the hysteria and physical objects start to obliterate themselves, as DNMF’s insistence on single ideas renders them capable of anything – the idea ceases to be a cocoon of limitations and starts to become the only thing I know for sure. An omniscient, axiomatic noise.

The album’s final 8 minutes feel like having a torch pressed into my eyes – the metronomic bass drum makes me imagine that I can see my own blood pumping into my brain, while high-pitched tones project themselves at me like fire condensed into a hose. There are emphatic jolts of change that throw my world into sideways, and stretches of repetition that wring my brain of all independent thought. Perhaps this is what would happen if Lightning Bolt were drugged and sent to blow up the sun: flesh bubbling within unfathomable degrees of heat and light, a gun firing at the corpse of a cymbal, and a broken mechanism persisting as if it’s forgotten how to die.