Pneumatic Detach - Pareses Re:infected

The brand new remix disc from Pneumatic Detach "Pareses Re:infected" was an extremely pleasant surprise, in many ways. Pneumatic Detach's first release, on Frozen Empire Media has been sold out for some time, so my knowledge of them is limited to a few appearances on compilations. All I knew was that they were a rhythmic noise band, and their album was supposed to be pretty good.

The music and variety of music on this disc really blew me away. Little did I suspect just how good this CD was going to be, despite having a great roster of remixers, including Scrap.edx, Kreptkrept, Iszoloscope, Antigen Shift and Symbiont, it far surpassed my expectations.

The range of music incorporates aspects of ambient, idm, rhythmic noise, drill, break beat, power electronics and even a touch of ebm and old school 90s industrial. There is no way to specifically pin down the sound of Pneumatic Detach from this album, with each song being re-worked to incorporate whatever sound the remixer was going for. Instrumental tracks make up most of the cd, but vocals and samples are also added, and are more than welcome, giving the music a broader range than the great mass of rhythmic noise bands out there. In fact, using such a term as Rhythmic Noise may be deceptive to what their sound is, and so I think I will have to resort to user the border term, Industrial to describe them.

Although the bands that I was expecting to do some great mixes succeeded, bands of which I knew little of and wasn't expecting anything from, more than succeeded, with incredible mixes from Detritus, C2, and AEC (battery cage).

The packaging for the limited edition first run is also incredible, and was another surprise. Before it came in the mail, I had to put a image of the CD cover on TiK Distro website and found only a solid black jpg on the Hive Records site. I figured that they hadn't gotten around to scanning and uploading the image. But no, the album cover is black. Thoughts of 'This Is Spinal Tap' came to mind, but these were erased when I received a package of them in the mail. A solid black digi-pak in an anti-static bag is an amazing design, in my opinion. It just oozed with cool, making this CD seem more special to me.

Squid @ July 2003