Gridfailure & Megalophobe — Tasukete
New York Projects Gridfailure (David Brenner) and Megalophobe (Benjamin Levitt) have already released a joint album last years Dendritic, and now they are returning with their second full-length collab. Gridfailure is the experimental project, close in sound to industrial / noise with ambient elements. Megalophobe is a quieter and more balanced sound, close to Experimental Ambient.
Tasukete, which means 'Help Me' in Japanese, was released by the American label Nefarious Industries. At the moment, the album is in the pre-order stage, but after October 5th will be released a digipack CD and digital version, which you can order on the label's website or on the Bandcamp pages of the label and artists.
The cover is a black and white blurry picture of some textures. Against the background of these textures, in the middle are large white hieroglyphs. Against the backdrop of the hieroglyphs, red-tinted letters spell out the releases name. Logos (or official spelling) of projects are made in red and are located at the bottom of the cover, one under the other. They are also made blurry and duplicated in the form of vertical reflection. The cover seemed to me not very attractive and poorly thought out. It came across that whoever had created the cover was in hurry or had little interest in the final result. But, it may very well be that this style was chosen specially.
The album, with a total duration of just over forty minutes, consists of eight tracks. I will talk about my impressions about this album as a whole, not stopping at individual tracks since the whole thing seemed to blur togeather.
When creating this album, a lot of musical instruments were used - guitars, bass guitar, percussion instruments, synthesizer, accordion, and many other instruments, as well as a large number of electronics, samples, and vocals. All this is more than enough to create a unique and powerful album. But, in my opinion, the attempt failed...
I’ve listened to this album four or five times, trying to understand the artists, to feel the atmosphere, to hear the composition. And I’m afraid to say I found the album difficult to review. And on the whole, I’d say it’s the most problematic album I’ve reviewed for M[m] thus far.
Despite the obvious professionalism and talent of both artists, most of the album turned out to be chaotic, very uneven and dissonant mess. I’d say at times it almost feels like sounds/ textures have been randomly thrown together. For example in the same track, you’ll get atmospheric ambient mixed with drums, concrete noises, electronics, acoustic guitar and highly distorted vocals in the style of Power Electronics ... It creates a feeling of simultaneously listening to stylistically different tracks, respectively, this creates a feeling of the album constantly falling apart. And instead of immersing ourselves in the atmosphere, we just hear the sounds.
Sometimes this sound mix becomes more orderly and brought to mind something similar to Norwegian experimental jazz band Supersilent. And at other times you can hear connections to the likes of industrial/experimental projects like, early Psychic TV , or early Current 93. From time to time you can understand the compositional design of artists. But, sad more often than not, it feels like they just dumped a load of radom ideas into one album.
These ideas separately could work well if they were used by one project, but not in a collaboration. I heard more from Gridfailure than from Megalophobe, although, judging by the information attached to the album, the contribution of both artists to the record of this album was almost the same. However, the quality of the mixing and processing seemed to be pretty good though-out. Despite the moments in which there is a rather raw sound, we can hear every sound. Perhaps this is the greatest merit of the album.
With all due respect to David Brenner and Benjamin Levitt, unfortunately, the second collaboration album Megalophobe and Gridfailure seemed to me unsuccessful. I understand that many forces, creativity and ideas were invested in this. But artists were not able to take advantage of the opportunity to implement it correctly. I find it difficult to describe what I listened to several times, because the album did not have any stand-out moment for me, and to be honest I didn’t really fully recall any single track. Maybe it's just not for me, and others will enjoy it more…but as with any review, it’s just my take on it.