AICHER is the work of longtime label veteran Liam Andrews (My Disco, EROS), with additional production
from his My Disco spar Rohan Rebeiro - an experimental percussionist and erstwhile collaborator of Roland S.
Howard and HTRK. Together, they make resoundingly coarse, bullish industrial musick, distilling fascinations
with tone and space through eight gristly and darkly sublime cuts, sharpened by production from Boris
Wilsdorf of Einstürzende Neubauten and Swans fame.
Through 8 cuts, ‘Defensive Acoustics’ reveals a clammy touch of reverberant buzz and below-the
belt shudder with a creeping, sensual signature of authority that strongly reminds us of Alan Wilder’s
Blasphemous Rumours-era sound design for Depeche Mode, stripped to absolute skeletal fire. Tectonic plates
of sound are pushed to an extreme biting point in a sort of structural stress test that feels like an oil rig in
action, or perhaps more acutely, junked at harbour.
We go from the lurching buckle of ‘Ascertain’ and bilious atonality of ‘Harness Pleads’, to the vertiginous
scale of the title piece and the brutal momentum of ‘An Exhausted Image’ - almost collapsing under its own
bass weight, while the pranging girders of ‘Constriction’ makes us think of that 101 version of ‘Stripped’ -
propulsive, full of primal energy and clanging, clipped reverb. ‘Possessions’ ends the album with a passage of
bleakly romantic ambience, a judicious emotive counterweight to the preceding gnarl.[info sheet from distr.]