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Argument #03 // Cage Suburbia
After two earlier releases in their 'Argument' series for Haunter Records, label co-founder Daniele Guerrini and Matthias Girardi aka Weightausend are back asking difficult questions again. Following on from Somec's warped technoid reduction, 'Source of Uncertainty' a few months ago, the third part of their 'Argument' series as Cage Suburbia marks the first on 12" vinyl, following the label's step up to the format late last year. 'Argument #03' sets itself at some distance from the skittering, modular experimentalism of Somec's release however, as this EP is brims with dancefloor charge. Every fibre of the release rattles and buzzes with energy, as if trying to escape its confines and run a million miles in the opposite direction.
As usual, Cage Suburbia take the opportunity to stamp their anti-establishment views to the release inciting civil unrest with a series of stickers which accompany the record, as well as using quotes from Klaus Maeck's cult classic, 'Decoder' throughout opening track 'Copkiller':
"Information is like a bank. Some of us are rich, some of us are poor with information. All of us can be rich. Our job, your job is to rob the bank, to kill the guards. You go out there to destroy everybody who keeps and hides the whole information."
Albeit a sideline to the music itself, it's encouraging to see artists using their voice to make their political stance overt at a time when contemporary music largely stays clear of such leanings. The track batters and clangs against itself, mad-eyed acid-loops burrowing diligently in the backdrop, before building to Cage Suburbia's data-moshed, reverberant transition into 'Black Ops'. It is one of the most gratifying things about the EP that it is pieced together as a whole, each offering overlapping the last with no room for silence. 'Black Ops' alters between clattering breakbeat and dozily swaying half-step in a mesh of rumbling, motor-engine drums.
The EPs guttural tonal pallette is maintained to the last, 'The Vault' and '20134, 56 MI' exploring progressively more frenzied 4/4 abstractions. The former bumps forward like an off-road vehicle jolting across difficult terrain. The latter pushes things into overdrive, jacked-up cave-techno booming through an echoing mess of stuttered hi-end percussion and trembling chimes.
All of Guerrini and Girardi's physical releases are cut from assorted jams with various machines and the live foundations of their working methods are as present as ever here. It is perhaps this that gives the Cage Suburbia project such persistent, jet-engine levels of energy, capturing various fragments in time without overworking them long enough to lose their riot-inducing charm.
In the words of Haunter Records themselves, this is 'punk rock for the paranoid age'...
- Published
- Nov 19, 2015
- Credits
- Words by Theo Darton-Moore