Bill Leeb has been around, moving in circles on the industrial scene forever, having founded Front Line Assembly and Delerium, and worked with stacks of other acts, perhaps most notably Skinny Puppy. Perhaps having been so busy is the reason it took until last autumn to release his first solo album, ‘Model Kollapse’.
Now, we get ‘Machine Vision’, a counterpart release with five remixes from the album, plus a previously unreleased song, in the form of ‘Fireshow’.
I confess, by no means for the first time, that with a few notable exceptions (the leading one being Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Fixed’, I find remix releases a real chore, trudging through the same song with more or less beats, whatever or whatever, and while ‘Machine Vision’ certainly sits at the premium end of the remix EP spectrum, it still gives us three versions of ‘Neuromitive’. They’re all solid, offering varying degrees of beat-dominant technoindustrial aggression, and the Narcissistic Flow Mix of ‘Infernum’ pulses hard. So does the Black Chromium Mix of ‘Fusion’, and this perhaps brings us to the nub of my personal obstacle when it comes to such releases: they become so much of a muchness, an as much as I like a hard beat as anyone, I never got into clubbing because the monotony of the same tempo and frequencies, on and on, simply left me bored.
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Perhaps predictably then, it’s ‘Fireshow’ that stands out, largely by virtue of being different, with a change of tone and tempo. It’s not just the fact it’s slower, but it’s also more nuanced, more atmospheric – and it’s also darker, sultry, weird, more subtly gripping, too, and arrives as a welcome shift after back-to-back whiplash-inducing club-friendly bangers.
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