An incredible 2nd chapter of Wold’s “mentation electronics” under the Black Mecha moniker for Profound Lore, following the project’s first emergence via The Death of Rave in 2015. This is properly indescribable, genuinely odd music, fused at the meeting point between Black Metal and Power Electronics, think somewhere between the primitive, early experiments at GRM, MauriziocBianchi’s noise reductions and the spannered techno obliterations of Russell Haswell for an idea of what you’ll find within.
If you recoiled in horror at their debut LP, AA, then you’ve probably got no business here either. But if that LP stained your mind as badly as it did our’s, you’ll also be ravenous for the visceral effect and burning focus of the project’s second LP.
From the evocative artwork on the front cover, to the track names, and, fundamentally, the sound of monotone revs, Merzbow-like maelody and hackling drum machines, this album speaks in a unique and poetic techno-primitivist dialect whose linear, condensed rage and emotion is belied by a hypnotic sense of resolution and eye-of-storm calm in a way that connects the urges and intent of Black Metal proper both to power noise and industrialised electronics.
Taking cues from occult, surreal sci-fi culture and literature, and delivered from his nonpareil position in the nebulous field of extreme sonics, Black Mecha employs his Internal Masonry thought inference technique with cryptic incision over seven parts: firstly in a series of five succinctly invasive probes, taking in the bitterest electronics of I.M. Mentalizing, the churning revs of Brain Saw and Psy Fall, and what sounds like a spasmodic Maurizio Bianchi in Head Works; and secondly in a pair of relatively longer pieces including the densely layered gale force of Natural Laser and its deeply buried truths, and then, most remarkably, with the intensifying knot of roiling gristle and diffracted, lacerating laser tones in Mental Picture.
If anything, we can safely say that it’s a worthy follow-up to its outlandish predecessor, AA, and arguably one of the most vital dispatches from the brink that we’ve heard since that record. If you’ve ever been compelled by music from Merzbow, Alberich, Maurizio Bianchi, Russell Haswell or Dave Phillips, and loved it but weren’t totally sure why, then this album is strongly tipped to you.