Review Summary: Slit the skin and count the pixels
With
Kendo Dynamics, Bristol-born producer Antoni Maiovvi creates a cybernetic metropolis riddled with paranoia. As Pleasure Model, he explains
Kendo Dynamics' vision as robophobic: developing a bizarre fear of surrounding lifeforms being devoid of humanity, their grey matter flooded with wires and circuitry. It’s an anxiety one might develop as they become detached with the overwhelming nightlife, losing synch with the tech-driven euphoria. Maiovvi is a driving force behind Giallo Disco Records, which conveniently helps describe the sound present (“giallo” being an Italian horror genre with supernatural elements). Think Bottin’s
Horror Disco (2009), but with a much better sense of scenery and a more convincing psychological component - less cheese, but still some. From A to B,
Kendo Dynamics is never settled in its journey, constantly peppered by little environmental triggers like neurological gamma rays. Flashing lights are delirium, a mysterious stranger is a retro-futurist assassin, the DJ is GLaDOS, and so on.
Opener “Pill Towers” could be the soundtrack to a Cronenburg-y scene of visceral pleasure and mechanical interference, similar to Roger Ebert’s description of
Crash (“
like a porno movie made by a computer”). It’s a bizarre algorithm of an individual’s technological unease and a pervasive club energy; granted, this is the album’s running theme, but "Pill Towers" appropriately feels like a springboard. Rapid, ever-changing percussion drives beneath eerie synths, steadily building. The claptraps are delivered almost tormentingly, like a legion of partiers unknowingly mocking an outsider’s discomfort. Follow-up “Mounnrocc” sees some relief without much lapse in energy, blending the liveliness of house with a less intrusive vibe. Much of
Kendo Dynamics succeeds in capturing various little self-contained angles on the same robo-anxiety-club theme, with different mindsets and a great sense of fluctuation in pacing. “Sweetner V’enst” is one of the least fearful tracks, with an exhilarating beat and almost zero mental interference; on the flip side, its successor, “Bealichtbach”, broods over a backdrop of blurring city lights and chunky, industrial synths.
Pleasure Model’s endgame is positive, despite all the themes of distress and whatnot.
Kendo Dynamics ultimately comes to terms, accepting these phobias not as red flags, but as anchors to humanity. It’s like someone well acquainted with a bustling nightlife undergoing some drastic life change, and then feeling like some brain chip had been damaged or removed, allowing them to see the environment more realistically - think
Totall Recall meets
Strange Days meets
Party Monster, maybe. Songs like “Abandonment Issues” seem to cope with a sense of identity loss, as though every sequence has the protagonist sprinting through an alley, dropping little sentimental knickknacks - like, memories conserved in USB format - only to reach daylight and discover everything intact. This is just a bit of a roundabout way to say
Kendo Dynamics is a narrative of both trepidation and reassurance beneath addictive beats and engaging soundscapes in an unknown - and probably irrelevant - timeline. Antoni Maiovvi explains that his inspiration for the album was a sort of self-induced phobia resulting from “
[blaming] it all on replicants at the time.” It captures the essence of a film like
Blade Runner, where a life of fear is synonymous with one of enslavement.
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