Igloo Magazine: The Cursed Species
Zak Roberts aka Cdatakill says about the thought process that germinated his second full-length release, The Cursed Species, that he wanted to reclaim old school sounds, to make them his own and retrieve them from the tyranny of “happy hardcore.” Harder, faster, louder than Paradise, his previous Ad Noiseam release, The Cursed Species eschews atmosphere and noise for the giddy power of the dance floor, redrafting the euphoria of rave parties and endless disco nights into a menacing 21st century beat explosion. The nearly ten minute centerpiece of the record, “Reclamation Song,” takes the rave aesthetic — endless rhythms running straight through till dawn — and twists it into a knot of Gordian pulses as broken beats and staggered percussion eat themselves in a continual generative loop while miasmas of menace drift through like clouds of burning poison. “Graceless” slashes through a spoken word transmission, a radio signal that is cut and sliced by the digital hammer of breakcore, smashing the vocal line into an unintelligible patter that loses its linguistic impact and becomes just a rhythmic sequence. “Hymn of the Siamese” slams a gabber rhythm into a crowded room of innocent ravers while “Swarm of Vicious Insects” builds from a chaste bell tone and piano melody into a stomping, snarling soundtrack for an insect plague, replete with strangled air raid sirens, subsonic rumbles from giant wings, and pestilential eruptions of percussion. By the time “A Death Worth Reliving” finishes its calamitous disintegration of your speaker system (opening a hole in your floor straight down to Hell, naturally enough), this party has been turned into a stroboscopic nightmare of epileptic fits and grand mal seizures. And I say that like a good thing.
