Motorlab #3

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This is genuinely odd music. Although the artists, especially Pan Sonic, are famous for their (mostly electronic) experiments in the past, nothing could have prepared me for this.

As the first track 'The Hymn of the 7th Illusion' starts, a female choir is singing chromatic vowels: Aaa! Aaaa! Aaa! The melody (as such) is extremely simple, consisting only of 3-4 notes most of the time, and for a considerable time that's all there is to hear. Then the male voices join in, resulting in a mixed choir, and the vocal exercises continue. After which, slowly, one by one, different instruments appear. A minimalist bassline repeats itself upon the kind of drone, the balefulness of which derives from its undefinability.

The melody of the vocal exercises (some of them actually quite cruel, and nearly all somewhat unpleasant) keeps surfacing, making 'The Hymn...' a hymn. The Hafler Trio remix is about as minimalist and bleak as the original, with more emphasis on hacking and sound processing.

A very stark, minimal and strange record. Certainly very different from.. well, about everything I know. There is some resemblance to dark ambient, but the sheer, perhaps calculated, weirdness of this record sweeps all comparisons away. Genre-defying.