Matter – Raw Material (Album – Ant-Zen)
Genre/Influences: Industrial-Techno.
Format: Digital.
Background/Info: Italian producer Fabrizio Matrone strikes back with his new album, which comes twenty years after he started Matter and three years after the brilliant album “Primitive Forms” –which was my favorite full length from 2018. “Raw Material” is inspired by Shoshana Zuboff’s book “The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism” and features eight songs.
Content: Matter holds on the Dark-Techno influences of the previous work and again mixes it with brutal Techno beats. The album takes off with blasting sound treatments and scratching sounds. The work is characterized by repetitive loops, which are sometimes leading the listeners –or should I say the ravers, into trance.
+ + + : The sound of Matter is a warrant for high-danceable music from the dark edge. This work is a new, powerful production, but also a true sonic chemistry between Techno- and Industrial music. The production also reveals impressive, heavy, powerful sound blasts, which especially at the debut tracks are resonating out of the speakers. Fabrizio Matrone is a sound guru or a music shaman who has accomplished a new masterpiece.
– – – : This is a great production, but without the similar magic of the previous album. The debut tracks are astonishing, but the sound formula is progressively getting repetitive.
Conclusion: “Raw Material” can’t compete with its predecessor, but it remains a brutal, dark piece of Industrial-Techno.
Best songs: “Data”, “Surplus”, “Behavioural Future Markets”, “Algorithm”.
Rate: 8.
Artist: www.matters.it / www.facebook.com/matter.it
Label: www.ant-zen.com / www.facebook.com/antzen.official
About Matter
Matter is the project of Italian producer Fabrizio Matrone, based in Bologna. His label Ant-Zen describes the work as focused on industrial electronics, rhythmic techno walls and analogue soundscapes, and lists earlier releases on Kvitnu, Subsidence, Black Chrysalis Archive, Le Petit Machiniste and Soviet Media Kontrol. The album “Primitive Forms” appeared on Ant-Zen in 2018.
“Raw Material” was released on 7 September 2021 by Ant-Zen as a digital album. Mastering is credited to Philipp Münch and the artwork to Stefan Alt. The record holds eight tracks, listed on Bandcamp in lower case as “data”, “surplus”, “algorithm”, “prediction”, “maximization”, “behavioural futures markets”, “accumulation” and “experiential realities”.
Ant-Zen states the album takes its concept from Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power”, and its track titles follow the vocabulary of that book.
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