Brood Ma - Daze (2016)

Marking this as his debut on Tri Angle, DAZE is actually the third in a series of wildly ambitious and confounding albums Brood Ma has put his name to in the last few years, generating a good deal of intrigue and acclaim along the way. His first release ‘FISSION’ turned heads with its juddering, noisy take on EBM, while the follow up, ‘Populous’ (reissued in 2014 by pioneering dubstep label Hemlock), signaled for many the arrival of a genuinely unique and intriguing talent, bolstered also by his affiliations with the endlessly fascinating and undeniably forward thinking Quantum Natives collective. Which brings us to DAZE. By stripping back on some of the beat-suffocating distortion that defined some of his earlier work and by zeroing in on some of the more disorienting side effects of immersing oneself in trance and hardcore styles, Brood Ma has made his most radically club-oriented release to date. DAZE is a direct byproduct of Brood Ma’s ongoing interest in dissecting how (and why) we build virtual worlds and an obsession with the high-definition sound design techniques most often used in trailers for Hollywood blockbusters and video games. These are the sounds of death and destruction, stripped of their grisly truths and molded into plastic or mechanical shapes. DAZE is a dizzying and exhilarating soundtrack to dystopia and a violent virtual world that is becoming increasingly harder to separate from our own realities.