Published by Alessandro Violante on March 31, 2019
Artificial, refined, structurally flawless, almost unreal in its perfection. It’s the music produced by two veterans such as Canadian artists cEvin Key and Phil Western in their unreachable unknown room, the result of an approximately seven years long effort of painstaking work. Sadly, Unknown Room, released by the Canadian label Artoffact Records, is also a tribute to the defunct musician Phil Western, who’s recently passed away. Unknown Room is a 100% Canadian-sounding album, well-crafted but sometime empty and a bit out of time.
However, Download come back with an album which, if compared the latest efforts produced by Skinny Puppy as well as by Front Line Assembly and ohGr, could catch the attention of the listener in a better way, encouraging him to listen to it many times. As the reader will probably already know, Download’s roots have to be searched back in 1992, when Skinny Puppy’s Last Rights saw the light of the day. One of the most important albums of their career, it was conceived during an intense period of suffering, which completely redefined their sound. Download is the name of its final song, an eleven minutes long session of sound manipulation in which Dwayne Goettel and cEvin Key put together a suite made up of cut-ups, samples and dark-sounding ambient music, a research or a divertissement, the will to go further and to explore new music solutions, something similar to what Download’s debut album, 1995’s Furnace, became.
Since then, many years have passed, and other ten albums were released. Unknown Room is the last one, the follow up of LingAM, released in 2013. It doesn’t change Download’s formula at all. In their unknown room, these two talented musicians, with a well-deserved self-referential approach, once again quote their music, but also, in some way, that of ‘90s Skinny Puppy.
Although these well-crafted compositions could sound cool, during these years the so called “industrial” music scenario has deeply changed its codes, getting back to a renewed punk and do-it-yourself approach. This is totally absent here, a fact also due to the obvious lack of the historic Skinny Puppy’s keyboardist.
At least, it needs to be said the two musicians have not blindly followed these new winds of change coming from the techno scene, keeping on following their brilliant and particular path, and the result of their effort sounds good, especially in some songs.
One of these is the opener called Monster island, having an intriguing rhythm and bassline enriched by random samples adding something more to this song. Other ones are the engaging and faster DUGaDUGA and GUI goats, which will make you dance with their syncopated rhythms. Other songs, such as 23 years, have a strong vintage nature, in which you can find sounds coming from old school gears such as Roland TR-808 drum machine, but we can say the whole album has a certain vintage motif, which will make happy the old school fans of this project.
The listener should expect from Unknown Room nothing more than what it is – a manneristic, well-crafted and well-packaged album. Let’s think about the wide range of special editions you can buy, among which, obviously, there’s vinyl. Maybe, Unknown Room will be the epitaph of a project which, in its own way, has gained its place in electronic music history.
Label: Artoffact Records
Rating: 7