Review: Ion Plasma Incineration - Outer Reality Engine
There is no deliberation or moderation. Outer Reality Engine is a cold, hard kamikaze of machine instinct – 1s and 0s in alternation, with the obliteration of apocalyptic presence striking within vacuums of pure absence. It’s numb and anti-euphoric; a meditation on the absolute, where the ecstatic extremes of kaleidoscopic techno, black matter dubstep and cyclonic drum ‘n’ bass lose all sense of magnitude within the infinite. I’m hurtling at terminal cruise control, yet paralysed into stasis by the persistent intensity; frozen under the pulsating strobes of space capsule emergency, breaking the sound barrier over and over and over again.
The rhythms are ruthlessly rigid, as though each beat is an isolated calculation of co-ordinates; perhaps it’d feel more like subterranean club music if the notion of buzzing, bass-gunk excess hadn’t been replaced with an assured, militarised movement, stomping forward as though hard-wired to do so. Equally, the vocals lose all sense of catharsis in their inexorability – anger renews itself to the point where it ceases to feel like anger at all, and starts to resemble a constant state of emotional twilight; a pitch-black that knows nothing else, illuminated only by the strings that lurk behind the beats like a neon horizon line. Darkness resonates forever with a cold, vertical clang.