Published by Alessandro Violante on March 20, 2016
Joey Blush, musically known as Blush Response, is an artist always capable of surprising and innovating with his releases. As if he was a surgical scalpel, the american artist, who moved to Berlin some years ago, cut to then resew sounds and musical genres (techno, industrial, EBM, dark ambient, noise), maintaining his cyberdark-imaginative sound and an obscure mood, with an highly recognizable style. Rebirthed in the Sprawl is released by Total Black in a limited edition on two tapes, a canadian label that, since 2015, is based in Berlin. It’s the idea of a urban sprawl that rapidly grows and expands itself, subject to unpredictable mutations, that here is put into play also through a dirty and dystopic dark ambient that slows down the techno beat, until it’s transformed into a minimal pulse made of gloomy drone music, a soundtrack for the urban voyage, psychographic drift at the end of the night, in which the echoes of the northamerican and european cities seems to fuse themselves into a gloomy and noisy maelstrom.
Rebirthed in the Sprawl seems to be reborn from the ashes of his very good release Future Tyrants, published one year ago by Aufnahme+Wiedergabe, a label that is building a new Berlin style with an approach opened to all the dark electronic, post-industrial and post-punk sounds. While Future Tyrants put into play a maximalist approach that saturated the apocalyptic dancefloor made up by the musician, this release on cassette constitutes an immersion in a dark spot of the mind in which, sometimes, echoes of the listening of Mille Plateaux‘s albums emerge, especially in the first tape, that contains the two parts of the titletrack. With his analogic machines, Blush builds a voyage that hasn’t fear to go deep in the outskirts between the wakefulness and the slumber, from the Prurient-like free form noise to the post-techno pulses which sounds are similar to those of Northern Electronics / Posh Isolation. In Unmade in the Ether, the track divided in two parts of the second tape, Blush, once again, saturates the sound with a composition that works on tension and accumulation before emptying it, in the second part, into sonic barrages that, as if it was a mutagen virus, attacks the swerved persons that agitate themselves in the slums of the sprawl. A very good release that present approximately thirty minutes long compositions, a work that shows the versatility of an artist capable of painting fascinating, as well as gloomy and dystopic, scenarios of the urban future.
Label: Total Black
Score: 8, 5