The Sprawl

The Sprawl

EP 2

The Death Of Rave

“Mumdance, Logos and Shapednoise remerge The Sprawl for a banging, incendiary second EP in their trilogy inspired by William Gibson’s Neuromancer - the 1984 sci-fi novel which uncannily presaged The Internet and aspects of AI which have since morphed from fiction into reality.   EP2 is about ‘Data Flow’ and thus catches the trio in flux between flashbacks of noise as information overload and brutalist techno chronics seeming to emulate the sensory obliteration of full frontal temporal sickness.   Each producer’s individual characteristics are parsed and consolidated in a fractious transfer of energies, placing themselves as cybernetic semiconductors in a quantum network of emerging AI consciousness, pooling corrupted memory banks of physical and pharmaceutical ecstasy, excess and synaptic muscle memory to manifest premonitory visions of future hardcore rave as hyperstitious, viscerally IRL.  The A-side picks up directly from EP1 with the invasive strategies of Burning Chrome - so titled in reference to Gibson’s short story which first coined the term “cyberspace” - fulminating pure sound designer noise in bruxist shockwaves punctuated by lush pads, before the cyberpunk terror of Black I.C.E. hacks into the nervous system with sickening, arrhythmic dynamic, strung out between chest bursting ecstasy and stomach churning panic.   That’s all seemingly in preparation for X System, a 150bpm bunker breaker lodged on the B-side with a cold fusion of lamping bass drum and slithering plasmic timbres sounding like some Dutch or NYC ‘90s techno bomb dialled in via a faulty ISDN connection, which makes for a...

The Sprawl

E.P.1

The Death Of Rave

THE SPRAWL is a scindicate of mutant soundcarriers individually known as Logos, Mumdance and Shapednoise. Following their improvised live conception at Berlin’s CTM15 festival, EP1 documents THE SPRAWL’s debut studio transmissions in the first of a series to be archived by The Death of Rave. As their moniker suggests, The Sprawl is heavily influenced by William Gibson’s eponymous and prescient trilogy of sci-fi novels; most crucially the cybernetic predictions of Neuromancer and the ways in which its notions of uploaded consciousness and the effects of technology have played out in our collective reverie. Hacking up memories of late ‘90s tech-step and the millenial dread of early grime thru a matrix of modular synths, haptic constructs and computer software, the trio))) jack-in a quartet of corrupted memory updates emulating the physical and mental impact of SimStim overload and fractious hyperreality. Head first, ‘Drowning in Binary’ plunges into a maze of recursive techno-chambers vacillating white hot dis-torsion with arcing, weightless pads, before glyding across a tumultuous topography of chrome burning flares and violent, body-quaking detonations in the morphing scape of ‘From Wetware To Software’.With ‘Haptic Feedback’ they grasp the quicksilver rush of classic Prototype and Reinforced Records in a strobing sequence of picnoleptic, kinaesthetic flashbacks and transitory segues smeared with vision-blurring noise, stranding us in the below-kelvin, post-human headspace of ‘Personality Upload’ unaware of up from down. By design or chance, the results distill a scrambled uchronia of references, incomparably conflating the obscure French speedcore subgenus of La Peste with a ruffneck...