Review Summary: 24-minutes of pure, unadulterated, mind-numbing, darkness.
I won't lie when I say that my interest in Xanadu has only grown with each release. From his debut EP, to
Nemuri No Kuni, Xanadu brought a breath of fresh air to Power Electronics. In March, Xanadu embarked on another ambitious project, a new, 24-minute epic called
Crooked Beloved.
To be completely fair, the EP is just a 24-minute track, but that does not take away from the fact this is much different from Xanadu's previous releases. The creepy atmosphere is still there, mind you, with distorted bells playing a melodic tune over the backdrop of a distorted static noise. One could be easily fooled by the tame atmosphere of the first 7-minutes, as the volume is turned down very low at the beginning. This doesn't last long, as soon the track escalates into burning synth noise, disturbing microphone feedback, and odd footsteps heard in the background.
Things get even worse when a multitude of static noises begin to collide into each other, creating a chaotic mismatch that burns at the eardrums. This is soon downplayed by a continuous laser noise in tandem with a small microphone feedback. This small piece quickly ends, and by the last few minutes we are gifted with the distorted sound of someone's voice being filtered heavily, and a static sound of a newscaster talking. Neither of these things I could understand as they were filtered to an almost inaudible state. Finally, things end with weird moaning and large synth rips turned up to maximum volume as it suddenly comes to a complete stop.
Power Electronics is all about complexity from simplicity. This is the idea that, if many simple ideas come together with no restraint or baseline goal, they can create new identities and ways of thinking from the chaos. Xanadu applies this idea very well, but in ways I have not heard before. For starters, Xanadu's love for distorting the sounds of everyday things like wind, water, walking, and even trains; are all things I have not heard from many Power Electronics artists (Whitehouse delved into that a bit, but only once in a blue moon).
Since I first heard Xanadu's debut EP, I knew something was changing. I could feel it; but most of all, I could hear it. Something new was coming to Power Electronics, something we had never experienced before. Usually, PE artists relied on aggressive tracks to make the listener fear what is in front of them, but Xanadu doesn't. Rather, he seems fully content in giving us a general idea, and then letting our minds run rampant in their own self-given anxiety. It is with that we suddenly begin to fear everything, even ourselves. That, is an achievement in itself.
