Review Summary: Driving music for kaleidoscopes.
This is the latest project from Neil MacKay, former bass player of Loop. Check out the albums Heaven's End, Fade Out, and Gilded Eternity - these are monstrous excellent albums! These were largely the vision of Robert Hampsen.
Silent Invisible Radiation is Neil stepping into his own creations, and they are monstrous excellent unto themselves! He's added Minimoog Voyager to his bass rig, and the tunes are mixed combos of bass, synth, sequencer jams with live drums. And Damon Belchambers is a killer-tight drummer!
The first track is Dr Who - which isn't a cover of the TV show theme song at all, but I guess it's their interpretive feel of that classic song. And if you dig the Dr Who theme, you will dig this whole album, and that's a big part of the vibe they lay out for the rest of the album.
Uhu opens with a darker vibe, squelchy synth bass coughing up a bit of primal ooze, recurring through the track. No live bass on this one, but layers of pulsations drive this one right thru yer brain.
Neu1... I guess it might be a tribute of sorts to Neu! But where the previous tracks have been big on synth, this one lays it on very heavy with multiple coats of live, echo-ey bass painted all over. Think Floyd's One of These Days, folded over itself endlessly, like a möbius strip.
Inta4 is built around some mad, mad, mad drumming by Damon, flanged to the maximum, and hazy-but-tight. Afrimerica makes for top-notch-trippy driving music, with live bass recorded backwards freaking it out quite a bit - and, like the name of the track suggests, the song takes you on a trip halfway round the world.
Fans of To Rococo Rot, Tortoise, and The Ex should give this one a listen.
