There are times when I am listening to music and it feels like I am getting way too much sugar in my diet, losing sensibility and understanding of where I am, and the only way to get myself sorted is to give myself a strong dose of something so off the wall, so vibrant and intense that it completely resets my ears. This is when I turn to the music of David Brenner, the noise merchant who operates as Gridfailure: a dystopic blast of the future which is in various shades of grey as the industrial landscape collapses in the wake of a nuclear explosion. Here he has combined with soloist Jon Paris, who has released the first material as Rack for more than 10 years. Paris used to be highly active, but has been dormant in recent years, but David has taken old material from Rack, resurrected this and built it into his own nightmarish vision. Jon also provided some new structures and material to blend it all together and this is the result.
The Rack material has been joined with field recordings and then brought together with the auditory nightmare which is Gridfailure to create one piece of “music” which is more than 70 minutes in length. I have put the word music in inverted commas many people would challenge the notion that this is music, such is its assault on the senses caused by the overloading of instruments that are being distorted and changed in very strange ways indeed. If I had not seen the name Rack on the cover then I would have assumed this was another straight Gridfailure album, as while some of David’s collaborations have quite distinctive elements which make them stand apart, that is not the case here. Possibly I need to look back and listen to some of Jon’s earlier material myself, but here it has been subsumed and become part of the white noise hell which is Gridfailure. Dynamic, frighteningly intense, I truly believe Gridfailure are an incredibly important element of the current music scene, and this is a triumph.
Rating: 9/10
Links:
https://rack.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/gridfailure
