Detroit Underground’s back catalog is large enough to feed a 24/7 radio station and diverse enough that you’d never get bored. Moreover, it sounds like they have fun, signing left-field releases and placing them alongside driving club-ready techno tracks they’re as delighted to discover as they are to share. After Adam Jay’s LP Maxia Zeta comes the chopped up, scatterbrained and apologia for industrialized transcendence, Helicon 2 by LODSB.
Tracking this by song feels wrong: it’s one of the few albums (out of the many, since every sod seems to have an “album” on the market these days) that actually feels interrelated, that there’s a kind of order and progression and logic that would be irreparably harmed if taken out of order or sold separately. The rough and dark and lethal-edged ambient sounds of track one (they all have names that for all I know could mean something but look like a parody of complex German word constructions) coalesces 11 minutes later, the chaos coming together however briefly into a kind of “song.” Burial does this, Yoshinori Hayashi does this but few others have the vision or patience to do it well. By Track 5, things have fallen apart and reordered again.
Listening to this album feels like it should be accompanied visually by a map presenting the development of civilization over an enormous timescale, from formation to construction to expansion to destruction and back again. That’s one metaphor, I guess, and probably not the subtle logic behind Helicon 2 but you’re welcome to go where it leads you.
LODSB: Helicon 2 (Detroit Underground)
01. Holoapostatischer Frühsperling (05:19)
02. Adhesive Skalarmäeutik (08:42)
03. Der-Name-des-Vaters vs. Der zerbrochene Spiegel (09:25)
04. Indifferentes transkraniales Yogakalkül (12:47)
05. Vexiertes Gestaltpathogen (09:24)
06. Progressive Regressionsnumerologie induzierter Operational-Konditionierung (07:54)
07. Malefizische Maschinenelenktik (08:08)
08. Kognitiver Quecksilbersee der Meinigkeit (05:38)
First published in issue 149 of 5 Magazine featuring Pomo, Joey Negro, Paul Oakenfold, Adam Warped and more. Become a member of 5 Magazine for First & Full Access to Real House Music for only $2 per month.
