Thursday, 5 December 2019

Masturbatory Dysfunction & Acid Enema ‘The Ultimate Beat Off’ C-21 (Ominous Recordings)


Every reader has had the experience at which their (at least partial) dissociation with musical norms reaches the point of being beyond conversation: the inability to (or to be bothered to) explain yourself to someone who – quite reasonably – is just not going to ‘get’ Brighter Death Now or Masonna or Xasthur.

That dissociation is now encapsulated in ‘The Ultimate Beat Off’, a reworking of Felicia Gaggins’ source material by the members of Acid Enema: a venn diagram intersecting Cold Meat-leeched death industrial, glacial black metal and beat-driven electronic music permutations. Opener “(Draw My) Blood” crawls through a swamp of urban run-off, barely pulsing synth slowing an audible heartbeat as vocal globules coagulate near the surface, counterpoint to the march of “Late Night Filth (Back Alley Spit Roast Remix)” which explodes in a fit of drum machine fury which tramples over the initially grey synth of the source material.

A futuristic bastardisation of martial industrial starts side B via “March To The Graveside (Noth 1001 Remix)” and is perhaps the last developed idea on the cassette, but it’s over quickly and followed by a grim piece of hovering smog and rasping gasps as “Cum (Harder)” veers erotic asphyxiation to the point of near-no-return, the light fading and taking with it any orgasmic impetus.

Death, industrial, metal, pornography, underground rave culture, exsanguination, impenetrable noise, isolationism: ‘The Ultimate Beat Off’ covers it all, the ideal point of social disconnect and for a life of underground genre immersion.

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