Voam レコード& CD

Review: Fresh from launching their Voam imprint via an EP of clanking, mind-mangling industrial techno workouts, Blawan and Pariah don the Karenn alias once more for their first full-length outing. In keeping with their fuzzy, hardware-based approach, "Grapefruit Regret" is fiendishly forthright - a buzzing, crackling collection of club cuts built around armour plated kick drums, creepy and dystopian aural textures, chunky basslines and hypnotic, opaque lead lines. Occasionally it sounds like the product of two guys banging bits of metal against towering Brutalist buildings, at others the breathless soundtrack to illicit raves in car parks beneath crumbling Soviet-era municipal buildings. Throughout, it delivers some of the most intense and intoxicating techno jams of the year.

Review: Long before Karen was a universally accepted epithet for entitled middle-class white woman, there was Karenn, an uncompromising techno duo who do artful things with menacing noise. Pariah and Blawan have been on and off making music together since first launching this project in 2011 but whenever they do, it's worth hearing. This one on Voam is another case in point: 'Feeling Horizontal' is a monstrous and ghoulish stomper with twisted vocal darkness, while 'Happy Birthday' is a more lithe and bouncy cut with rubbing low ends and zippy synth texture. 'From Hunk To Husk' carries on the brutalist approach with more intense voices, bass and drums, and 'When Lutes Were A Thing' is a brain-bogging mix of sludgy sounds, spangled percussion and metallic surfaces.

Review: Peder Mannerfelt's high-sheen techno is in an advanced state of mutation at this point in time, and so it finds a perfect home on Blawan and Pariah's equally non-conformist Voam. This is the third EP the plucky Swede has graced the label with, and there's no shortage of fresh and fierce fireworks setting off across all four tracks. 'Pumping Plastics' is centred around staccato stabs that sound like a template for a hard dance genre which is yet to exist. 'Vankelmotor' has lithe, creeping textural work which sounds like rubber on rubber in the pleasure parlour while the band donks on. 'Eurotrashed' has a grubbier, mechanical techno impetus which fires off pistons of percussive pressure in pursuit of any remaining shreds of sanity, a quarry which remains elusive as we derail into the twitchy tension of 'Liquid Rattan Mainframe'. Superlative, in all the best ways.