Review Summary: Breakcore hailstorm soothe my soul
Breakcore is traditionally the territory of loveable melts whose frazzled synapses only cooperate under the most righteous fits of discontinuity - jank for the janked (we love it). This gives me licence to skip over introductions for e-project Midxna (fresh; on Polish virtual label SVPACYBERIA; lean on the whole who-am-I front) and cut to the question of the moment: since when has this sound made for such a potent bliss-out? Across its deceptively expansive 25 minutes, Midxna’s debut
control is an illusion uses a synthetic ambient drench in conjunction with atmospheric drum and bass as a Trojan horse to get those manic fill-maelstroms-in-place-of-beat right through your front door. It opens in a beatless daze, launches into a relatively straightforward pair of drum and bass tracks with all the bracing comfort of a hot powershower, and gradually destabilises its beats while ramping up the tempo - all to the effect that when things do begin to get bumpy, you, dear pal, have your seatbelt very much
on.
This is subtly done - the gap in rhythmic consistency between, say, "drowned" (upper-tempo drum and bass) and "memory loss" (lower-tempo breakcore with several unobtrusive beat splinterings) is the kind of subtle increment you'll need to pay close attention to, but by the time the EP climax comes around on the frenzied "hysteria" (firmly in breakcore territory at 190bpm), the fruit of Midxna's ratcheting is gloriously evident. This EP's sweetest payoff is the way it tricks its audience into asking themselves some variant of
fuck a duck, has this always been so intense? in its final minutes, only to immediately realise how smoothly the artist has eased them into this critical moment. This is why
control is an illusion, uh, works, but the reason it makes for such a satisfying (not to mention highly replayable) release owes just as much to the depth of reverie - the synthscapes here are so commanding, so blown-up and blown-out in to distinctly #liminal effect, that the EP’s atmosphere never loosens its grip. This is reflected across the breakneck tempos, which scan kinaesthetically less as full-tilt hyperspeed and more as an accelerated shortcut to the hypersensory (which, in this case, entails an oddly comfortable white-out). Good stuff - it’s rare to hear an artist triangulate their sound between ecstasy, speed and atmosphere and take each to such unobtrusive extremes.
