So where, exactly, are the satellites of hate? [a]Nic Endo[/a] joined [a]Atari Teenage Riot[/a] two years ago to wear scary make-up and add an extra dollop of violence to their cacophony. But now, with her own ‘Poison Lips’, we must set the controls for the heart of the bland.
Imagine the confusion. Given Endo‘s radical agenda of dispensing with male producers and reappropriating the squelching noise – for which her women-only Digital Hardcore offshoot Fatal was formed – you might expect a tough, no-nonsense barrage of bloody noise. What you get instead is distinctly middle-of-the-road. Radical ambience? The means defeats the Endo.
And yet the amniotic dullness of space is with us, the patient purring of evil, the robot monotony of the background hiss. With few beats, even fewer tunes, and not a joule of warmth, ‘Poison Lips’ takes us on a trawl through the sonic obsessions of lo-fi sci-fi, the analogue drones and clunks of a sub-Kubrick nightmare, and finally puts us in orbit around a distant planet and leaves us there for a long, long time.
Metal fingers you won’t be needing in your body.