Isambard Khroustalio — Shanzhai Acid

Shanzhai Acid is a ten-track, nearing half-an-hour trip into woozy, wavering and slowly unbalancing electro- texturing/ modular synthesizing from Isambard Khroustalio- aka British composer and sound artist Sam Britton. The release appears on London's Not Applicable, as either a CD release or digital download.

The CD release is certainly worth a mention- its a mini gatefold that comes presented with a thick booklet. This is a full-colour glossy affair, which takes in a selection of digital pixelated images, texts, patterns & abstract tech-related visuals, which all nicely ties into the sonics with-in. This I’d imagine is going to be fairly ltd, so I’d act sooner than later, and to do just that or find out more about this release drop by here. 

I first become aware of the Isambard Khroustalio project around 2008 and have largely enjoyed what I’ve heard from it. With a personal highlight been the 2018 collab with Frank Paul Schubert That Would Have Been Decent, which was a woozy–to-caustically seared trip into modular synthesizing & avant Sax playing. In total, the project has thirteen other releases to its name, though Britton is also in three-piece project Leverton Fox- which also features Alex Bonney (electronics/cornet), Tim Giles (drums/electronics), though I’ve not heard any of their work.
 
The album kicks off with“A Pre-History of Cybernetics” where we find a blend of tone stretching sinister-ness, and whining electro sweep. As we move on we come to the piercing whining forking meets beaded texture stretching’s of “Pong Dynasty”. There’s the manic robot-like chatter meets glitching electro improv of “Conflate More”. With the album playing out with the wavering tone shifting sci-fi synth washes meets scuttling electro texturing of “Meanwhile Cephalopods”. As with most shorter and sonically unbalancing albums, Shanzhai Acid really works best as a single trip, but as you can see from the above there is both depth and shift throughout the album unfolds. 

Shanzhai Acid is primed perfectly for those looking to drift off in warbling ‘n’ wavering sci-fied sonic unease. And I could see this certainly been a great soundtrack to reading more trippy/ psychedelia fiction, be it sci-fi, strange fantasy, or more star-bound Bizzaro fiction.