Genre: Noise /Death Industrial / Rhythmic
01 Introdestrukktion
02 Traumatized
03 Neurotoxin
04 Dead
05 Dungeoned
06 Catharsis
07 In the Morgue
08 Morbid Anger
09 In the Morgue (Remix)
10 Dungeoned (remix)
If, in some future time, computer technology enables true artificial intelligence to become an everyday reality, with all the connotations and implications inherent in the word intelligence, then one wonders where it will lead us. Will intelligent sentient robots live and work side-by-side with their flesh and blood creators, constrained by the programmed safeguards of the Three Laws of Robotics as propounded by the late Isaac Asimov? Or will they, as some think inevitable, overtake us and become our masters instead of our servants and relegate us to the status of inferior beings?
Listening to this album of ten crunchy, acidic, pessimistic and unholy pieces by German industrial noise outfit Kaliber 9 has prompted my imagination to conjure up all manner of unpleasant images in this regard. It’s bad enough that the silent threat implied in our total reliance on the omnipresent computers and their associated networks remains unaccountably unacknowledged by our present 21st century global society – what would happen should everything up sticks and break down? If you consider that a scary scenario then how much more so is the idea that one day we get to the point where the artificial companion becomes a familiar sight in our homes and workplaces and on the streets – and what happens when they decide that they want equal billing with us humans and we refuse, what then?
Kaliber 9 conjure up images of vast armies of perfectly synchronised and untiring machines, built by our own hands, marching to a battle that will decide the ultimate fate of the human race and its place in the universe. Combining mechanically precise rhythms, death metal stylings, whiplash electronics, ambient washes and tsunami of relentless noise, along with interjections of the less regulated human dimension, such as snatches of music and woodwind, the two lines face each other across the divide of the ideological and physical battlegrounds, the human and organic on one side, the steel and electronic on the other. Ripping straight in with the demonic voice and tectonic cataclysm of the opening track ‘Introdestrukktion’, this lets you know in no uncertain terms that the war is about to begin; the massed mechanical war machines bring their shock and awe tactics to bear in the follow on track ‘Traumatized’, syncopated beat underpinning the pounding battery of the serried ranks of the engines of noise and battle.
And so it continues, with interludes of less bombastic attacks bordering on the ambient in between the ceaseless battering, but still with that focus of concentrated strength and power, huge swathes of heavy, stifling and suffocating sonic density, perpetually and unceasingly grinding away, wearing both man and the world we know away into nothing but dust. It would be fair to say that the machines had good teachers though; if the pupils had learned through mimicry then not only would they have learned how to serve but also copied our violent and warlike ways too.
It’s an uncomfortably misanthropic and oppressively pessimistic vision being expounded here; if you were looking for light then you landed in completely the wrong place. Fortunately Kaliber 9 seem to take great delight in making us feel this deep discomfort, to yank us forcibly out of the safety zone we have deliberately built around ourselves, strip away the blinkers and confront us with the frightening reality of a possible future. We should not run and hide though; we should instead look it in the face and stare it down. We are, after all, the masters of our own destiny.....
