���"Heavy electronics", indeed. Originally released as a massive eight-cassette box set limited to a mere fifty copies (which naturally went out of print almost immediately), Alberich's 2010 debut full-length NATO-Uniformen was an electrifying collection of industrial experiments, thankfully finally reissued by Hospital as a deluxe double LP set. Obviously, some of the material from that initial four-hour collection had to be left out of this scaled down version, the album condensed down to its most potent components to produce a more streamlined version.
���The work of one Kris Lapke, a member of black metallers Ash Pool alongside Hospital boss (and Prurient mastermind) Dominick Fernow, Alberich took form as a monstrous amalgam of noise, techno and power electronics stylings, and the blighted black pulsations that palpitate across NATO-Uniformen comprise a key release in the relatively recent resurgence in industrial techno. The tracks nineteen tracks collected here traverse blasted sonic terrain, moving from jet-black electronics and surges of dread-filled dystopian ambience into passages of heavily distorted electro-shock rhythms and pummeling machine rumble, surrounded with a detached, desolate atmosphere. Vague militaristic motifs are fetishized within Alberich's corroded soundworld, from the stark album art to the eruptions of warfare sonics scattered through the tracks. As harsh as the atmosphere and mood is though, this stuff can get pretty infectious, from the murky darkwave synthesizers that wash across opener "Atlantic Munitions Development" to the barbaric technoid thud of tracks like "Infrared Kommando" and "Skysweeper". Lapke fuses his forays into grim industrial techno with a screeching ferocity lifted right out of classic power electronics aesthetics; elsewhere, his grimy, juddering concrete-mixer rhythms are diffused into gleaming metallic dronescapes that threaten to stretch into infinity. Most of the album centers around Lapke's use of crushing, massively distorted rhythmic loops which he welds into immense hypnotic forms, at times resembling the sound of a marching drum squad that has been slowed down and distorted into a grimy machinelike rumble, the muffled rhythms stretched across fields of cinematic synth-drone and rivers of volcanic low-end rumble.
���Other tracks unleash vicious assaults of earscraping power electronics, distorted screams rattled by the trancelike throb of malfunctioning tank-engines and waves of squealing, tortured electronic noise, overlaid with ancient Cold War media transmissions and waves of charred static; the ghostly residue of fractured electronic melodies clings like black soot to skittering, minimal techno, and rumbling mechanical dirges are slowly buried beneath warbling synth chords and swells of monstrous bass. Some of the tracks that really stood out for me included the insidious, dub-infected dancefloor funk of "Limit Mitigate Counteract Transmute" that almost resembles Sutcliffe Jugend being remixed by Cut Hands, and "Man Is Ready" is interlaced with vintage Tangerine Dream-style synths, like fragments of a score to some unseen Michael Mann war film. And the on the magnificent closer "Immortality", Lapke crafts an atmospheric kosmische epic that further dives into that classic synth sound, swirling through a gleaming fog of arpeggiated electronics like something off the scores to Thief or Sorcerer, but suffused with an almost suffocating nihilistic air. Essential stuff for fans of Alberich's distinct brand of heavy, pessimistic industrial music.
��� Comes in gatefold packaging, limited to seven hundred copies.