This certainly isn’t your regular rap album. But then, arguably, it isn’t really a rap album, and in truth, it’s not your regular any type of album. A brain-mashing collision of forms, it’s equal parts urban, jazz, electronica, hip-hop, avant-garde and beat poetry, defying parameters of culture and convention – or, as they describe it, ‘urban music based on mostly acoustic instruments, in a hostile, yet natural, environment; A landslide of voodoo Dub evoking phantoms and bass cultist conjurations’.
Eerily ominous strings drone and scrape over the senses before the most immense, distorted bassline swells and buzzes and warps the magnets right out of the speakers: to describe the sound as ‘phat’ doesn’t get anywhere near. Opener ‘Sulphur Goat’ segues into the post-apocalyptic jazz of ‘Queda de Regoufe’ .Amidst the drones, the erratic, the woozy brass and woodwind, the monumental percussion and general chaos, guest wordsmith Seraphim throws out lyrics in a tone that falls between despair and panic.
‘Irradies’ melds a trudging industrial-strength beat with a snare like a whiplash to grating bassline and top synth line that’s enough to slice the top off your head: it’s urban EBM delivered with the kind of force Trent Reznor was once capable of in the early 90s. There’s more weight with the nine-minute ‘Stone Fire’, which is slow and relentlessly heavy in the way Swans’ ‘Cop’ is relentlessly heavy, the percussion unyielding earth-shuddering and the bass frequencies sufficient to loosen even the hardiest, most retentive of bowels.
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What really brings ‘Landform’ to life is the format: previously released in 2009 as a download-only, it’s been pressed lovingly into two slabs of heavyweight vinyl with new artwork. Consequently, this reissue creates room for the frequencies to expand, to rumble, to circulate. In short, ‘Landform’ illustrates perfectly why vinyl is still king.
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