Ever get freaked out by content recommendation algorithms? Somewhere out there sinister AI constructs presumably operate in the forbidden depths of Silicon Valley's evil subterranean tech-fortresses; emotionless yet somehow grinning droids growing more powerful as they discern every hapless click from users worldwide, listening closely through every innocuous device, calculating tastes, pulling the strings to contrive influence as if they were the CIA and our brains were third world countries. Extremely freaky stuff, no doubt: so the existence of music where that imagery - of godlike computer minds, deep in cybernetic oblivion, imposing their unknowable will onto worldwide watching/listening habits - is somehow engraved into the very sound and, apropos to nothing, fatefully autoplays, that sense of paranoia may be justified.
Paranoia resonates throughout the cinematic catalogue of the Colombian industrial techno (or whatever) project Filmmaker; a prolific distributor of bdsm beats and glitchy guilty-conscience grooves who since 2018 has released a daunting catalogue which is surprisingly digestible if approached chronologically. The best of his first forays into nightmarish noir include the apex hedonism of
Love Market, the nyctophobic meltdown of
Nocturnal, and this release
Somber Realm; a dystopian dungeon-crawl that shudders with end boss energy, a night terror that never sounded so good.
Filmmaker nurtures that feeling of unwanted lucidity through evocative track titles and great album art. That cute but definitely malevolent spirit may well be luring the listener to a party so underground that it is in hell; despite the album's surface intentions to have you frozen in fear, the bass/snare offer something decidedly kinetic and corporeal, inspiring an undeniable compulsion to dance. Other than the beats, which definitely f
uck,
Somber Realm mostly consists of stalking spidery synths, sordid bass throbs and various other thrums, hisses and whines which appear and disappear from the tracks as the album revels in its unnerving otherworldly kilter.
Complaints which might be expressed about
Somber Realm may cite the homogeny of the album, something which affects most of Filmmaker's work to some degree; a fact offset by the thirty(ish) minute album length and deliberately bitesize songs, which give an even distribution to the generally great but not extensive array of ideas. That's not to say the best cuts here (probably "Hermetik" and "Evil Reigns") aren't very memorable, and any sense of deja vu only plays to the album's strengths anyway. The bottom line is that this is music to dissociate to, and we should all be grateful to be able to dissociate when robots grow closer to brutally superseding mankind with every passing second.
