Ensi Genxyde - Music to Destruct the Masses

When I saw the genre description that accompanied this release, I got quite excited..."Neo-Classical, Noise, Tribal".

I liked the idea of something different...something challenging...I even had hopes it could be something akin to Juno Reactor.

Ensi Genxyde is a solo project from Ohio, which describes its sound as being "swirling textures with noises, guitars, and synths mixing them with dark neo-classical composition's amongst tribal and electronic drum beats and industrial/futuristic backings"

Plenty to look forward to there too.

So I loaded up the tracks, and to my disappointment, what I found was a handful of decent ideas, sandwiched in-between a lack of production knowledge and incoherent musical direction.

The most immediate issue is the quality in recording and production.

The standard varies so much from track to track that this release feels more like a collection of demo's and b-sides than a coherent and focused album, but no one track ever sounds like a polished professional piece of music.

Some sounds are crisp and up front, others are fuzzy, muddy and hogging all of the middle frequencies...its a confusing mess at times that feels a bit thrown together, and this does not bode well for any musical style, let alone anything claiming to be 'Neo Classical'.

Having established that this is not a 'polished' release then, "what about the songs?"I hear you cry..."is there any credit to the writing of the tracks?"

Well...without wanting to get into the subjectivity of what is good art and what isn't let me just say that I struggled to find much about 'Music To Destruct The Masses' to get excited about in the writing of the material.

The tracks are mired in poor sound choices, and there is nothing that really stands out as being overly emotive in any major way...

It feels at times as if Ensi Genxyde is trying to write a soundtrack for some imagery that the listener can't see, and unfortunately for the majority of the time, the music is unable to successfully convey any message, feeling or imagery in an effective enough manner for us to even guess at what that might be.

That said, I don't want to completely write off this release in its entirety, as I admire Ensi's attempt to do something a little different and to challenge himself.

'Seq5' for example has an almost Bladerunner vibe to it, with gentle pads underpinning the movements of guitar noise and feedback. Its quite hypnotic and has a little something going for it, although it fails to reach any kind of a climax before the track finishes.

'The Abyss Part I' likewise has some nice elements and vibe to it, hinting at some of Reznor's soundtrack work with a strangely malevolent mixture of ebbs and flows.

Sadly though this is not enough to justify a good score for this release.

The production, musicianship and sound palettes make for heavy listening, and the ideas and song-writing are not sufficiently good to offer any serious reward to potential listeners.

A brave but flawed attempt at a genre that requires an awful lot of technique, expertise and production skill, and unfortunately this appears to have been a step too far for Ensi Genxyde at this time, although I hope he will try again in future, with perhaps some mixing support. Jan 22 2013