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ELITE BARBARIAN – It’s Only When You Get To The End That It All Makes Sense (CD, Front And Follow)

Posted: August 24th, 2008, by JGRAM

One of the strongest electronic beep records you will ever hear, the new record from Elite Barbarian achieves a certain kind of ambience ordinarily/usually harboured by the most strung out and sensitive of electronic acts without using such barbed sonics. 

Tickling like the insides of a ZX Spectrum and playing out like the soundtrack of several Atari 2600 games; over the course of 58 minutes the album takes the listener on a journey of unexplored confines electronic beats/beeps often coupled with crazed sick piano licks. 

The author of the album is Ben Page who as a member of both Rothko and Rocket No.9 is a seasoned and accomplished composer of modern ambient extracts often emerging from improvisation and instinctive desires and trajectories.

The real strength of this record is the manner in which it achieves being both relentless and relaxed at the same time, tempered and tenacious in its brute meditation.  As the atmospherics grow so does the intensity as sonic layers reminiscent of raindrops, pulses and bubbling machinery scour your consciousness almost feeling transient as it interrupts the flow of your immediate activities.

Listened to as a whole the album merges into one great body of work not strictly to be swallowed whole but to accompany any mindset or duty that requires a holding hand to assist concentration and clarity.

By the time it reaches the 16 minute climax “Let’s Go Back To Morse Code” you sense you are coming to the end of being subjected to some kind of subliminal intake and that it is actually quite possible that the beeps could well be pieced together Joe Bonham style to forge together some kind of alien message.  You’re unlikely to hear this record at parties, only funerals.

Thesaurus moment: static.

Elite Barbarian

Front And Follow



JGRAM

JGram, friend of the stars, chartered accountant and pie enthusiast, likes nothing better than KICKING YOUR SKINNY ASS by way of a carefully-timed half-nelson followed by the CLOTHES LINE! OW! So never, never cross him. His dog Snowy is equally rockhard and will bite your lim bs off in the blink of an eye. And then paw your eyes out for blinking when he's biting you.

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