for DTRASH31 - "The Tension And The Darknesst"
Reviewed by Freq.org

"While still exhibiting the characteristic DTrash aesthetic of DIY digital noise and visual design, The Tension And The Darkness takes an almost Free Jazz approach to its composition. So keyboards and programmes stumble around each other; beats pick up into cartoon- style frenzies before a rapid fade into word collage and slow motion undertows of pitched-down rumbles, where the process of stretching the samples renders them grainy. 

The heaving motion of a track like "Custom Made (All Over)" staggers from trilling loops brought in collision with the cheesiest of electronic presets rubbed up raw by some devilishly nasty tweaking until the timecodes shudder under the strain. This is not really music anymore, but sound probed and distended into unhealthy shapes for the purposes of examination and revision - any melody or drum loop given any more than a few bars of linearity is soon sent packing. Sludgy morasses of liqufied digital matter and pureéd human voice wheeze and groan into electronic quagmires, but Exist do to manage to pack a bang-hard cyber porno Drum & Bass interlude into the midst of the unwell-sounding bowel-rumbles and gutted Pop queasiness in the shape of "When You Least Expect It (Hit You Like A Truck)" 

Each piece is like a miniature treatise on the mangling of pop culture: one second rhythmic, the next filtered to fuck and back with the cathartic glee of seemingly randomized outbursts. The Tension And The Darkness holds all the deceptively simple anarchic fun of pouring thinners on a collection of random charity shop albums and playing the results, but done virtually instead." warp9.to/exist

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