Genre: Rhythmic Industrial/ IDM/ Downtempo


01 Phreneticus
02 Today
03 Where Their Dreams Live
04 Silence Diary
05 The Animals Hanging
06 24th Dimension
07 Cant Get Me
08 Manage My Sensibility
09 Shamisen Jangle
10 Perphenazin
11 ...No
12 The Final Walk


Strange thing. Zentriert ins Antlitz, a German trio, has been working and creating since around 2003 and managed to issue three full-length albums plus a few more things to get into and I found it only this year when I heard ...no! release. Well, obviously, if you get released on Tympanik Audio, people will get an idea about you and your music will reach a wide audience. I think it is a good fortune for the band to get attention of Tympanik Audio and Zentriert ins Antlitz were lucky and talented enough to put their way to the audience through this US monster of production (in a good sense of this word, just see the amount of  bands they discovered and presented to the world of Rhythmic Industrial music). The line up is: Marc Friedrich, Jürgen Warkentin and Holger Meuler.

Music brings really different images. There are stellar clusters or a bunch of meteorites approaching you slowly as in realistic 3D games. And you are travelling in an open space, observing miracles and the feeling of limitless delight fills you and you feel fulfilled. All the movements are slow and lazy, the air is viscous. Slow and measured, soft rhythmic structures create a feeling of a dream. Another image is strangely vintage styled, I guess it is due to additional instruments used, like sax and strings (as in 24th Dimension track). You come back to the streets of the 80s, with all the aesthetics, big hair, colourful clothing, punkish youth. It is an interesting experiment (or anything else, I dunno how to call it). Or it is a return to the luxury cars and burlesque of 50s and roaring 30s. It is like creating the frame and changing the filling element. It is interesting to travel through time with the same outline. However, the outline here is not just a simple background, a rim for diamonds. Nope. Both go hand to hand. All those echoes from different epochs are rather a touch to the tracks. Apart from that there are oriental tracks (Shamisen Jangle or Perphenazin), with percussion used as that touch I was talking about, and there is one track, Can't Get Me, which stands aside from the album, with trance elements and straight beat, not such a common thing for this album as the basement of most of the tracks within this album, holding the essense, has its roots in glitch. Sometimes the sound on this album makes me think to a good Slovak old-school dark electro project, Disharmony, which made a remix on Perphenazin track.

As for the means of experession, as I already pointed, they are not restricted to different electroid and technoid sounds. The influence of classical composers and movie directors reveils itself in using string sections, for example, and ambient patterns that generally remind soundtracks to science fiction movies or simply tense moments in films. There’s no much noise in the music, I’d say there’s no noise at all, well, maybe except for some used for the sake of rhythm. Most of the time the sound is quite clear and even transparent, aerial, mysterious.

Zentriert ins Antlitz will also be interesting to those who like getting bonuses from the bands. This time those bonuses are additional CD2 (7 Dreams) and CD3 (Remixes) which can be extracted from the original CD after downloading specific software from the official band's page. Those bonus CDs containing remixes on Zentriert ins Antlitz tracks done by Totakeke, Subheim, Stendeck, Integral, Disharmony, Access to Arasaka, Unterm Rad, Autoclav 1.1, Lucidstatic, Pandora’s Black Book as well as bonus tracks by Zentriert ins Antlitz. So getting ...no! CD you actually get three of them!