UNITUS "Cross Contamination" DTECH02 CD Reviews

Dead Angel (www.monotremata.com/dead/)
TMU is outside Pym's apartment, having a smoke in the hallway and standing before the picture window, contemplating the vast pipelines of the great machinery outside, half-buried in the endless snow. It's a lovely picture, a peaceful scene that is abruptly shattered by a horrible sawing, grinding noise erupting from the other side of Pym's door. Then the entire hallway begins to shake and throb to a gruesome techno beat. Annoyed, he pounds on Pym's door until she appears.
TMU: Hey! HEY! What the fuck is going on here, the whole hallway's shaking... damn it, I'm holding you responsible for any structural damage that comes out of this....
(Pym ducks back in and turns the volume down)
TMU: So what is this, anyway? It's kind of... um... words fail me.
Pym: It's one guy -- a Canadian, i think -- making godawful noises with gadgets that sound like harsh drilling equipment, all over an insanely repetitive house or jungle beat. Something technoish, anyway.
TMU: Is this what John Lydon had in mind when he wrote "Death Disco"?
Pym: You got me, but I like to dance to this. It's loud enough to give you a nice body massage if you turn it up loud enough.
TMU (getting into the groove): This sounds really repulsively hideous in a way that's actually sort of morbidly interesting. And i do appreciate that groove... that obsessively repeated disco beat from hell... (looks at cd) mein gott in der himmel, this is gonna go on for like nine minutes? And the other songs are just as long? This man must do a lot of heavy dope.
Pym: Check this one out, "Recombinant."
TMU: Whew, that's some heavy reverb and delay drone hell. Droning power station music for the zombies of the undead or something. This is what i imagine them playing in the milk bar in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE after the droogs leave. These songs are still way too long, though.
Pym: This from someone who routinely records twenty-minute tunes....
TMU: It's a variety thing, bitch, you wouldn't understand.
Pym: Calm down and listen to "Descender." Isn't this diseased-sounding? Isn't that a beat that makes you want to take your clothes off and fuck steel-plated robots?
TMU (looking at her funny): Well... maybe not robots... you know, i'd like this a lot better if he'd get the drums and twee noises to be a lot heavier. The rest of what he's doing here is actually kind of interesting, even when it goes on too long. I do like the heavy crunching noise intro at the beginning of "Supercollider" -- oooo, such fine tones... loan this to me when you're finished destroying furniture, this might grow on me yet.
Pym: Sure thing. (dances back into apartment; wall-shaking volume resumes)

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Recycle Your Ears Zine (www.recycleyourears.com)
Cross contamination" is the first release from DTrash Records (which seems to be a quite active label from Canada) that I listen to and, as far I as know, the first album from this one man act called Unitus. With its straightforward, KMFDM-style cover artwork, Unitus doesn't suggest you'll find subtilities and relaxation in these 6 tracks and is right, "Cross Contamination" being the loud, noisy and massive thing that one could expect. 

"Cross contamination" is an album that can be quickly labelled as heavy rhythmic noise with broken beats. It starts with a really saturated drum'n'bass tracks, whose mid tempo bathes in a metal-like overdrive, making it sound very heavy and quite aggressive, the whole thing having a meshed pattern that somehow reminds me of 5F_55's first album. The second track mixture of electronic noisy drums and of a low distorted guitar. The later doesn't make the track sound metal or rock, but is well integrated in the texture of the beat, and just adds to the density of it all. This guitar is also used later in the CD, for example on "Cable Winder", with quite some success. "Metal to ashes" is a slower one, with a kind of scarce Gridlock-ian beat that bursts on top of several layers of scraping soundscapes, and a nice introduction to the big heavy and noisy "Descender". "Supercollider" is another surprising one, in which a broken rhythm and a keaboard like sound like they were played through an old, badly tuned radio. Finally, the hidden long piece on the 23rd track is maybe the catchiest of the whole CD, driven by a nice acid melody and a noisy but almost groovy rhythm. 

Unitus fully deserves to be called "percussive" and "noisy", doesn't really sound like anybody else, and benefits from a production which is quite above average for a noisy CD. Not going too fast but putting quite a lot of effort to build up long and heavy tracks, this project manages to get a good personal sound. All in all, "Cross contamination" sounds fresher than most of the rhythmic noise out there nowaday. The combination of tweaked melodies, saturated beats and guitars on some tracks makes this CD really "industrial", in the old sense of the word, and "Cross contamination" ends up being a really interesting CD that can appeal to a broad audience and that goes straight in the "good music" drawer. -Nicolas"

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