CCMusic.com

Impresario bone grinder, Justin K Broadrick, has prepared a new album for release on Speedy J's Electric Deluxe label as JK Flesh. Broadrick has resolutely inhabited some dark and punishing corners of the musical landscape in his three decades of music production. Whether as a songwriter, guitarist, drummer, label head, studio producer, or electronic alchemist, Broadrick has defined the sublime overlap of misanthropy, noise, and arson-spirited audio. Making his initial marks with grindcore and industrial bands Godflesh and Napalm Death beginning in the late '80s, Broadrick's musical career has arched from blast-beats to head-bobbing hypnosis. With a slew of recent releases from his JK Flesh moniker for Electric Deluxe, Hospital Productions, Downwards, Pi Electronics, and on AnD's Inner Surface, Broadrick has increasingly taken lo-fi cerebral sound exploration into techno's polluted ozone layer; drifting amongst violent collisions of rusty space junk and taking aim at the outmoded species below. JK Flesh's eight-track double-disc album for Electric Deluxe continues his assault on the failings and folly of humanity with a bludgeoning tour of dub influenced techno. A study in resolution, timber, and distortion, the album's tracks are diverse in mood and groove, but are united by the dark, porous, and undulating surface texture of rippling analog treatment. Contemplation of humanity's chances for extinction or evolution provided Broadrick with the mental scaffolding upon which the album's inky and caustic eruptions precipitate. Titles like "Different Species" and "Super Human" on the album's A side betray his interest in futurist's trans-humanist musings, while thumping garage baseline and searing interplanetary emergency sirens anchor the tracks in Broadrick's mastery of noise. The album is generally packed with full-form bass, percussion, and machine sounds. Though tracks like the B side's "External Transmission" juxtapose rubbery and wiry timbers, like the best of acid, over the low-end's boiling black cauldron. "Earlier Forms Of Life" and "Macromolecules" take morose side-long glances at the dancefloor, but primarily develop elegantly grime-filled grooves under the constricting spatial canopies of hyper-detailed delay and reverb. Surface detail and dusty timbers rake the listener's ear across the minimal composition of "The Next Stage". The albums closing track, "Homo Sapiens", drops you into the hopelessly gigantic hull of ship, echoing with sonar, heavy machinery and dulled low-frequencies as your iron tomb cuts across the dead oceans of our planet, or, as Broadrick has spent his musical pursuit, in search of a new one.