The strange, otherworldly music of The Perpetuum Mobile Space Vehicle is tough to wrap a descriptor around. Avant-garde sci-fi jazzdrone? Futuristic musique concrete/darkjazz? Bad dream electronica strewn with the trappings of noir jazz? Hallucinatory death-dub? Hmmm. It's strange stuff that seems to encompass all of those descriptions, and yet this collaboration between the Russian dark ambient/industrial surrealists Bardoseneticcube and St. Petersburg-based saxophonist Igor V. Petrov goes even further "out", mixing in strange dreamlike sound collages and twilight soundscapes with the more tangible electronic and jazz elements to create something that the label has compared to "a cross between Bohren & Der Club of Gore and Contagious Orgasm", which hints at the utterly alien music that these artists have crafted.
Perpetuum came out back in 2006 on the excellent Mechanoise Labs label, which has brought us other unique industrial-tinged releases from Necromondo, Stelladrine, and Seda E Marg, but nothing on the label sounds anything like this. I dunno how in the hell I skipped out on checking this album out until now. The six tracks on Perpetuum combine Petrov's hazy, delay-riddled and electronically manipulated sax lines bleat and drift dreamily across an ever-changing landscape of skittering mutated electronica, minimal dark ambience, circular piano patterns, slow heavy dubbed-out percussion, creepy robotic voices, samples of Russian language media, fields of sputtering bottom-heavy techno, ominous synthesizer melodies, swells of massive dubstep-like bass, ghostly singing voices, often set against strange tapestries of found sound that make up the background, everything from splashing water to urban ambience to children playing to birds to snippets of opera. There are more violent excursions into realms of almost pure noise, such as the scraping metallic cacophony and layers of frenzied free blowing that build into a hellish din on "Songong", and things get pretty heavy in a couple of spots, like the creeping dub-dirge of "Brownend" that begins to sound almost like a Nadja track with all of the distorted guitar cut out and replaced with dubstep-style low-end judder and a swirling, spaced-out psychedelic jazzscape. The mix of all of these sounds makes for both an odd noir-ish atmosphere and a distinctly futuristic and unearthly vibe, at times laced with harsh and discomfiting dissonance, at others warm and dreamlike. I love this album! Highly recommended if you're into the sounds of jazzy electronica but are looking for something darker, stranger, and more fringe, like hearing Bohren & Der Club of Gore and Autechre teaming up to score a paranoid dystopian sci-fi film. Released in a limited edition of 500 copies, and packaged in a full color digipack with amazing artwork from French designer STPo.