Brume - Battery Hens Sabotage flac mp3 download

After listening to P16.D4's dry, naive experimentalism, it's nice to hear something which really pushes the limits. Unafraid to use rhythm, they nevertheless expand their multilayered noise explorations to extreme lengths. The drum backing sounds like a stripped down version of post-BULLEN SCORN - broken break beats which simmer beneath a fractured and fragmented Jazz surface. Cut ups, found sounds blasted to extremis rub shoulders with structured urban primitivism. The pain of ZORN is muted to a dull ache which nevertheless atropies the nerve endings into a beautifully horrific ache. The scamps - they love to portray a kind of tamed, domestic madness - not the hopelessness of insanity, but a cathartic need to primal scream the frustrations of a post-Modern world, a place where Cubist idealism meets a drudge existance. Perhaps this is a purely fictional place, but BRUME's noise structures are fiction, they are art, taking nature, making it artificial then mocking it with STOCKHAUSENesque compositions. You can spot other possible influences - perhaps some RESIDENTS, maybe even some Outer Limits Dub, as well as an ethnic tribal approach to some of the drumming. What this gives us is one single track, split (they claim) into just ten separate slices, although the variety of changes seems so much more. This is without doubt BRUME's highest point so far. You kinda gather that throughout these (presumably improvised) compositions, they had heaps of fun. Some of the screaming, sax-like sounds kinda grate on your nerves after a while, but that's a small price to pay for such a brilliant journey through a Never Never Land that never was. DE FABRIEK have produced some startling moments, NARWAL's one and only album (insanely consigned to vinyl - why fergodsake?) and a handful of others have created vast, busy soundscapes which bring experimentalism to a higher level. Add this album to the list. Originally reviewed for Soft Watch.