Dataclast vs. The Earwigs

(Crucial Blast)
by Craig Regala

For “out there” stuff, you gotta go with Crucial Blast. Not my scene (because I’m lazy, not ’cause I don’t like it), so I can’t tell you where it lines up within consensus reality. I will tell you goodly portions of Dataclast‘s distorto-growl is lanced off old black/grind LPs and synthetic fuzz via DHR’s discography. The melody and hooks (ahem) come from actual played/sampled keys that’d work in any of the last ten years of Skin Graft “now wave,” or this decade’s “all hail the no-wave” gunk. The Earwigs are non-blasted beated; hell, non-beated pretty much over all. They remind me of “industrial noise” before dance music and arena rock got mixed in it. The kind of shifting, swooping, pinging murk to clean a mind dirtied by the incessantly bright jingleness of pop radio, advertising, and sound bite news.
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