Perhaps taking some notes from Otomo Yoshihide's most blighted moments of sampler-driven soundscapery, Japanese duo Grim Talkers employ samplers and electronic noise in tandem to create the abstract dystopian soundscapes found on their latest album Grimy City. The eleven songs featured here combine sinister hallucinatory soundscapes, surges of nightmarish ambience and bursts of cruel electronic carnage that aren't too far removed from the sort of abrasive noise that we've come to know and love from member Kohei Nakagawa, the main force behind the acclaimed Japanese noise outfit Guilty Connector.

    Grimy City unveils an abstract soundworld of clattering junk-metal slowly tumbling end over end across bleary jazz-stained ambience, recordings of frogs croaking and cawing crows en masse materializing beneath a soft cardiac throb, hypnotic hand-drum rhythms and sheets of muted electronic shimmer woven through strains of classical Japanese music and airy acoustic strings, these sounds then carved up into bloody streamers and further woven into looped deformities, smears of backwards sound and subtle free-improvised percussion and clanking metal swirling together into strange, hallucinatory forms. Not sure if these guys are into Christian Marclay's turntable-based sound collages, but it certainly sounds like they are, especially further into this album where their tracks become more loop-based. Huge breakbeats loom out of the tangled noise, massive bass-heavy blasts of boom-bap circling eternally through a storm of violent static squall and clusters of low-end drone, and on tracks like "Daydream Grime", they drift out into haunting shadowy jazziness surrounded by the sounds of a bustling city, passing traffic and distant shrieking electronics infesting the air while the soft slow shuffle of the sampled jazz is crafted into an eternal mesmeric loop, seething with charred, blackened electronics, the sound slowly shifting from that breezy dreamlike ambience into something much more disturbing and deformed, degenerating into huge expanses of rumbling Merzbowian chaos towards the end. Fans of the harsher Strotter Inst. and Herpes � DeLuxe material will dig this, a real creepscape of crumbling urban ambient filth.