Review: Yasunao Tone + Talibam! + Sam Kulik - Double Automatism

The noise subdivides my head. And again. And again. All at once, I hear the ambling panic of a lost trombone (Sam Kulik), the violent coughs of scalpel-cut circuit boards (Yasunao Tone) and synthesisers played with a persistently tasered hand (Talibam!). It’s an absolute fucking scramble, and I’m left with the sensation that my body has been virally hacked until my brain just spews binary garbage. All of nerves and neurons have been rewired. I go to move my leg and my head twitches; I see only pixels, and everything is cubic to the touch.

Tone doesn’t have any other mode but everything-all-of-the-time – ruthlessly apathetic in a manner that is definitely not human – and his noise frames the stereo image in an eternal puke of damaged computer guts and semi-automatic glitch. The other parties are both prone to exhaustion and capable of re-evaluation, and thus the speed and intensity of the central activity blooms and deflates accordingly. Right at the beginning of “Spome Trope” (the second of the record’s two halves) Talibam and Kulik slide slowly amidst Tone’s chatter like a gigantic sea liner grinding against the dock, rendered sick and sluggish by the bombardment of excess. I can empathise entirely.