Review Summary: Sensuous cold shoulder of glitch. Outstanding.
The latest from venna t, released under the title “變革的枷鎖”. (August 2025) a season mechanised. Glitch as harsh-noise-wall analogue, digital geyser surge of clicks, whirrs, hums, and micro-fractures, spurting, spurgling. Unquietly desperate collision and stasis together.
The album opens and the world is shaken by microscopic machinery, heard so close as to deafen. No lofty melody, nor human embrace. Instead: austere geometry of sound, mapped as though by a grave architect. The whir a habitat, den of a bear splayed with the guts of a machine sans off-switch. The glitching, the combusting are as the trembling of machinery that registers a fatal error, yet continues to operate. A deadpan calm over the riot of feedback. Somewhere in the incessant clicking you detect the ghost of a smirk. It doesn’t want you, and yet you want. It withstands you as you project that yearning onto whatever mechanical frisson it’s generating. This dynamic is deeply one-sided and undeniably motivating. Power is seduction. You hear this in the sheer austerity of noise: the album is too busy dismantling the concept of musicality to notice that you’re staring at it with wild, embarrassed fascination. You tune in, slick with attention.
The album makes us search so hard, yearn so deeply for traces of the human that we, incorrigibly steeped in ourselves as we are, cannot fail to find something of this. After all, this album is “a fully human-made product” (check the liner notes), but it resists identity, form, category. The implosion echoes in the cavities of your skull. It is not so much messy as exacting: each whirr and tick is calibrated and calibrates, each pause pregnant.
