Matera – Same Here – Review

Matera

Same Here (Invisible)
by Lex Marburger

Does this guy ever sleep? I mean, he’s on just about every dark ambient/evil dub/psychotic electro release coming out these days (geez, it’s almost like he invented the style. Wait a minute…). Funny thing is, he’s not slipping – yet. He keeps finding new people to work with, and he’s still manipulating the concept of what music can actually be. This time for Matera, he’s hooked up with M. Teho T. of Meathead fame, who adds words whispered and mumbled low in the mix (not lower, however, in the subterranean sonic sense of Harris’ Davy-Jones’-Locker-style bass grooves). In a way, Same Here reminds me of old Scorn, before Nick Bullen drank himself out of the partnership. But it goes further than just some laid back 16-ton grooves accented by bass and whispers. Been done, move on. Tracks like “Pure Realism” employ jungle-ized beats, and at times the beats get completely out of time with the song’s pulse. It doesn’t exactly sound…right, rather, it makes some kind of demented sense. Sequences and loops have a precise amateurity about them, a calculated awkwardness, certainly intentional. For example, on “Same Everywhere,” the drum loop is four beats long, and in the course of those four beats, slows down slightly, only to kick back to the original tempo when it loops. At first I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, it sounded like a total fuck-up. But it was the dominant pattern, rising above the bass and other electronic twiddles, loping and limping along like a hunchback with a gammy leg. Then something strange happens. After a few minutes of this, it begins to sound almost normal. You feel the groove, place the beats, I even bobbed my head along to it, although it looked like I had epilepsy. What do you expect from the ex-drummer of Napalm Death but something that completely fucks with your head and skews your perception of music?