syndrone - salmataxia review from igloomag A hurricane touches down in the first thirty seconds of Salmataxia, Syndrone's new record, a rushing, frothing explosion of sound that cores out your speaker wire, bloodies your ear canals and frightens small children within a thousand meters. It is an explosive blast of decompressing information like a hundred sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica run through a wood chipper. Syndrone's first effort at machine music noise was Triskaideka and that record presaged the formation of Merck records; with Salmataxia, Merck is laying down the challenge that their roster of IDM junkies can take on Schematic's crew of beat blasters. Salmataxia applies Otto Von Schirach's methodology of zombie beat crunchery to the granular complexity of later period Autechre and tries to wrangle likeable compositions out of the mix. It takes a couple of listens to figure out if he's successful. I want to say that Salmataxia is a record that plays better as a whole composition instead of a series of individual tracks, but "Pan_ic" defies my attempt at that simplification. I want to argue that the divergence of melodies and beats that occurs in each track is so wide that it's almost pointless to listen to them in any way other than as a continuous transformation of ideas and sounds. But then "Pan_ic" happens, and while the decay of its melody seems to be a radical departure from the opening theme, I can still hear the "theme" in the final minute of the track. I then hit repeat and listen to the beginning of "Pan_ic" again and, a minute later, I think: "Wait a minute. What track am I on?" It's a confusing head-space for a reviewer to find himself in. "Colnkft" furthers the confusions boiling in my brain. The beginning is a scraping dark ambient soundscape like something you'd hear on the spookier European noise labels. The beats drop in like spattering beads of hot lead. Syndrone then layers in an ambient melody as if we've just wandered into Brian Eno's Music For Airports. Over the next seven minutes he explores various combinations of these three distinct genres as if he were demonstrating just how mutable music can be. Normally, records that splatter beats and ideas with such a manic frenzy leave me exhausted, but Syndrone keeps my attention by providing tiny connective elements. While the explosive Chinese firecracker rhythms of "Caste" become more and more dilated as time signatures stretch, Syndrone keeps a slow tone running in the background, an sonic anchor which you can hang on to as the BPM drops towards the single digits. There are glittering tones that fall like slow meteors in "Slo ky." "Capital M" is propelled by an Einsturzende Neubauten style clatter of plastic boxes. Several listens later, I've got to answer my own question: does it work? I think the answer may be self-evident in the fact that I keep coming back to the this record. Confounding, sure, like all polyrhythmic cacophony can be, but Syndrone builds his Pollackian landscapes across placid ambient canvases. You can either float in the embrace of the big picture or lose yourself in the minute details that spill out in Mandelbrotian complexity. For both the macrocosm minded and the microscopic fetishist, Salmataxia has much to offer. - Mark Teppo syndrone - salmataxia review from absorb.org naturally one notices salmataxia's distinctive cartridge packaging first, and then the cover's elegant silver-black patterns whose small shapes resemble pharmaceutical tabletsÑa perfect visual analogue, as it turns out, to the dark and hallucinatory music that lies within. like two other recent releases, fzv's precedent and traject's strengir hrynja, salmataxia strives by implication to argue that the genre of claustrophobic machine-funk most definitively created by autechre isn't yet played out. syndrone's sculpted electronica reminds one of autechre's confield and phoenecia's brownout, if not the schematic style in general. it's a defiantly cold music whose surfaces possess a brilliant glossy sheen. one admires it the way one does some impeccably crafted and conceptually advanced weapon, impressed by the technology involved in its production but unsettled when witnessing it in action. the opener 'cachexia' immediately announces that salmataxia won't be an exercise in easy listening as nightmarish, post-apocalyptic sounds conjure a terrifying picture of a blasted landscape. pulverized pinging beats appear, bringing some semblance of structural stability to the detonating dissonance that blasts forth all around, until the piece implodes, collapses, and then segues into the calmer stutter of 'where for art' and its sound field of alien clicks and distant moans. percussive skitter, splatter-funk patterns, congealing electronics, and bone-crunching beats emerge throughout the disc's thirteen tracks in similar manner, although some calmer interludes like 'ntrld' intermittently appear. salmataxia is travis stewart's second syndrone release for merck following triskaideka (in fact the miami-based label's premiere outing) and is no doubt a more mature and accomplished statement in comparison to the first. the only problem with it is that, for all the respect it induces for the high quality of its construction and execution, it impresses less at the level of originality, so indebted is it to a style already established by others. while salmataxia argues with conviction that the genre isn't entirely played out, what it needs to remain vital are original advances upon the existing style and an emotional range that extends beyond the darker, nightmarish moods that artists like syndrone favour to an exorbitant degree. reviewed by ron schepper syndrone - salmataxia review from sutemos.net Travis Stewart youngster (aka Syndrone) is best known as Mashine Drum. Those were experiments in the theme of trip-hop/hip-hop. While under the name of Syndrone Travis Stewart is travelling through the more strict musical angles.The Debut album of Syndrone called Triskaideka (Merck, 2000) was a little bit lighter. The stuff in the new album surprised me a bit. Salmataxia is full of abstractiveness and very rough angles. This is very uncommon to the Merck. Salmataxia somhow reminds me of crazy and experimental Confield and Draft 7.30 albums of Autechre. Although the new sound of Syndrone was too concept for most of the listeners I would like to defend it and get back to the history about fashion that I have been telling like million times before. The essence of the album is to demonstrate the possibilities of technology. But in the year 2004 such technology does not surprise us any more (album have sounded in this manner back in the 2001). That is what is interesting about this album. Nouradays nobody creates the music in the manner of 2001 because everyone is interested in fashionable sound (I'm already sick of that). Another one big advantage of this album - electronica without tincture...According to the last releases of Merck this label is one of the few that do not like the fashion. They work according to the formula created a while ago. Stable formula. But the number of 1000 printing isn't changing as well...That is sad.

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