Published by Alessandro Violante on September 10, 2017
Three albums released in three years. That’s the short story of Slovakian musician The Opposer Divine, the electro-industrial side project of Minor Float (Terminal State). An alien coming fron Proxima Centauri (as mentioned in his song Proxima contained in his first album Barbed wire around your neck, an EBM affair), to talk to us about far stars, nanotechnology, religion, and more broadly, about topics related to the digital revolution. Changing into the wasteland is an album courageously self-released after two works, these two licensed by Alien Productions, a work which engages the listener.
The choice of self-releasing his final album is both a critique of the savage file sharing, and a need itself. P2P destroys the work made by artists, even in alternative music, although a lot of them have different points of view about this topic.
If we should think about his albums as if they were a trilogy, in his first album, the alien Minor Float arrived on earth coming from his star, focusing on religion. In the following Reverse//human he focused on war and proclaimed himself as a new messiah, and in the new album he criticizes the unexpected results of digital revolution (as in Second Life failure) and civilization, and in the end, closing the trilogy, he goes back to his planet. Minor Float left us the same message left by tons of electro-industrial acts: a strong pessimism about our future (It is too late is a clear example), and disappointment felt because of the positive things the end of the past century could have brought us, but never did.
Differently from the first album of the trilogy, it’s clear how Changing Into The Wasteland has its own sound, with its articulated rhythms, more varied and syncopated than in its previous releases, although always strongly influenced by dark electro musicians such as Object, but also Placebo Effect and Mentallo & The Fixer. The beats are definitely the leading elements of the album, and they strongly emerge within its songs, drawing complex and various patterns, including drum’n’bass influences in the aforementioned track Second life failure, showing a taste for electro in the final song, Revelation.
As far as its style is concerned, Minor Float repeats a sound close to the aforementioned bands, from Travailleur En Trance to Front Line Assembly and in general to the electro-industrial projects of Electro Aggression Records, without trying to edit its structural coordinates. It should be asked if still today there’s the need to keep on releasing tribute albums to a defined kind of music, linked to a social context now far away – but not too much – from our time and from today EBM music. However, Changing into the wasteland is a honest electro-industrial album characterized by retro sounds and old fashioned topics, that will turn on the interest of historic fans of this music genre.
Label: Self-released
Rating: 7