UnicaZürn - Propeller Guru

80 copies. That's all they made of this dynamically charged piece of sonic mayhem and it's a damn shame. UnicaZürn have previously done an album entitled 'Temporal Bends' (which featured Danielle Dax doing vocals on one song) which took my gray matter and then eviscerated it over a blinding white-hot iron grate. 'Propeller Guru' is the effect of having one's quivering mind then shoved through that grate into the inferno contained within. Say what you will about the moody, celestial tone of this cd-r but don't ever think that they aren't deadly serious about what they do. Languidly decaying columns of slowly morphing electronics move you through the many stages of what I'd call interstellar burnout. It is a dead star at the core of this little jewel and if you stray close enough, it will take you places.

You are gifted two long-form pieces simply entitled "Part One" and "Part Two". Don't let the functional titles fool you, this is an extremely organic outing from one of England's lesser known musical entities. There's a healthy dose of psychedelia in here, too. No, I'm not talking the tie-dyed Haight-Ashbury kind; this is when the trip goes bad and gets hellishly introspective. One finds themself questioning everything and having those prolonged rhetorical conversations inside their head. UnicaZürn are much like the set of very unpleasant exploratory equipment you'd find in an operating room during neurosurgery. In an uncanny and disconcerting fashion, you can feel 'Propeller Guru' doing things to your head in much the same way Coil's 'Time Machines' release did. Each section of the cerebral cortex is examined with microscopic precision. It is very important to play this thing all the way through, there's no picking and choosing sections. In these days of singles being done away with and the album format being questioned by less than committed types, UnicaZürn deliver a dose of vitriol.

Remarkable coloring goes on around 3/4 of the way through the first track as the drones give way to floridly malicious shifts in the equalizer field. Suddenly, it takes on a less than gentle tone with the building progressions of all manner of exotic analogue machinery. Thrower just cannot resist throwing his beloved clarinet to the proceedings. It sounds like a maimed bird retching on discarded plastic by-products dumped from a biological testing facility. "Part Two" commences with what sound like Penguins or some other arctic bird congregating on the ice, overhead there's a weather system moving in, bringing with it flashes of lightning and insanely forceful winds... the line between what these gentlemen do and Tangerine Dream's albums from the 1970's is direct and magnificently evolved. Take a listen to 1972's 'Zeit' to see what I'm alluding to.

Yes, this item is about impossible to get in physical form anymore but if you can locate one, snap it up and be sure to fasten your seatbelt while keeping your chair and tray in the upright position. There may be some turbulence ahead. Mar 16 2011