Genre: Rhythmic Industrial
01 Churl
02 Ghost in the Machine
03 Peeling the Layers
04 Between Two Worlds
05 Surgery of the Soul
06 Last Tribe (Endif vs. Replogen)
07 Reactionary
08 The Answer
09 Naked Bloody and Hungry
10 Soft Power
11 Police State
12 Police State (Billy Club Remix by Pneumatic Detach)
This has been one of the hardest albums to really push down into a needle of genre-labels in my three years of writing as a journalist. Ideally one could simply call this music rhythmic industrial and leave it at that, and really that's all it is with the absence of much experimentation or sound collaging. However, throughout Carbon and the band's own biography, you're going to find moments of power electronics, EBM, rhythmic noise, dark ambient, and whatever else in these dark electronic chasms you can probably imagine. One thing is for certain, this is an album that has a massive amount of flow coursing through its' veins. Carbon resembles a drug, pushing you for days on a binge, never stopping, never focusing, just moving and observing. Outside your mind is chaos, but inside and moving through your eyes, its perfection.
The strong pulse that carried throughout the album seems to carry on much the same tempo and it brings about an interesting note. This album is neither abrasive enough to be consider part of the noise realm, nor absent enough to be dark ambient. Truthfully, many of the short-lived synthetic melodies created in the album match many of the noises that some would become accustomed to out of a project like :Wumpscut:, but without literally any of the typical song structures found in the aforementioned. What we have here isn't music about formalities or cliches. What is represented is pure texture. An overall tribute to the humanity that can be found in electronics. Whereas most artists in dark electronic scene prefer to offer the typical variable that machine qualities bring about the cold nature that amounts to nothing short of misanthropy in its purest form, Endif display a creative warm aesthetic that combine both the proving grounds of early synthpop with the head-smashing strength of power electronics. We have both the strong and the weak, the furious and the calm, but we also in a way have neither.
The brutal sections of Carbon even break to the outer border of gabber at times only to pull it back and continue combining rhythmic genres. We are everywhere in this. I suppose that a track like “Soft Power” can say it all. Endif doesn't need overly abrasive sounds and thematics to sharpen his edge. Carbon retains the roots of rhythmic industrial while annihilating the stereotypes. If you're tired of the same old thing and want to listen to music that isn't concerned with what the scene thinks or following suit with other artists, then Carbon is for you. And its no surprise, as many of the artists on Tympanik Audio are continuing to break boundaries long after their initial stays on labels like Hive Records, Crunch Pod, and Ant-zen. That last sentence can even be seen as your basis. If you're a fan of most music from any one or all of those labels, then search this one out, because its a brilliant killer.
http://www.heathenharvest.com/article.php?story=20090531192049698