3CD, RROOPP, 2007
www.rroopp.com
Amp’s ability to manually or electronically manipulate, transform and weave sound into haunting landscapes propels the battered psyche of our century into an uncharted domain. It obliterates unnecessary beat extensions through binding melody, noise and spectral vocals. The listener must understand that the music was not composed for the typical amphetamine beat-boy. This is music for a genetically modified generation. It taps into the God Module (temporal lobe) and shows you the post-apocalyptic skies, cities and wastelands of the imminent future.
Amp defies genre classification and categorization. If you seek dark tranquility with a modest amount of surreal nuances, then Amp is for you. And if your metaphysical fiber yearns for progressive melancholy, then Amp is for you too. If you need to amplify the vividness of your second self or even restore memories that have in some way deformed your true self, then Amp is the noise for you. It’s the kind of music one plays to stimulate skinless creative output. Amp seems to have found an unfamiliar source of inspiration that concurrently draws on a cacophony of subliminal reverberations in order to deconstruct the banal binary rhythms one has shamefully come to expect of the experimental music industry. It enforces subtle melodic contradictions, challenges conventional resonance, and reprograms mundane patterns of thought to conjure up a kaleidoscope of seductively brutal imagery. Rarely do experimental compositions expand and compress sounds like this. It possesses a threatening mathematical undertone (especially track 9 entitled “ICU”) that may very well induce mild epilepsy. It’s the sort of thing victims of bipolar disorder should only listen to in their manic phase. Every track is a monumental decomposing painting. Persistent sonic echoes and howls lead dying and reemerging vocals into the forgotten chambers of your core identity. Subtle discordances merge with aged electric pulses. Guitar chords travel in an ominous and depressing manner; ceaselessly driving nails into ones already shattered dreams. This might be the primary objective of Amp; to jolt our genetic memories of discarded visions and rescue stagnant minds.
Amp is music for Art Deco elevators in Antonio Gaudi-like skyscrapers colonized by biomechanically augmented paranoid schizophrenics. You do not need limbs to dance to the Amp groove. In fact, I don’t think you need a body to move to its mystical resonance at all. Amp is for brain dancing, remembering, reflecting, realizing, predicting and unbolting dormant brain cells. The present future might not be ready for the psychometric soundscapes of Amp yet, but Amp is more then ready to grind its way forward once the apocalyptic signal rings across our simulated planet. Perhaps Amp should be cryogenically frozen for a few more years. I am not quite sure whether the current proto-cyberculture is mentally prepared for the journeys Amp has to offer. It may be that the disparate auditory stimulation that Amp creates is too overwhelming for the masses still distracted and lost amongst the options and mindless variety offered by Postmodernity.
[8/10]
— Ras Steyn