Laptopper and TestToneMusic boss Yukinori also goes by the name Dexter, and listening to the scary shit he gets up to here with Canadian expat guitarist/electronician Tim Olive, it’s not hard to imagine him moonlighting as a serial kiiler himself. The album title is also the name of french maitre a penser Gilles Deleuze’s celebrated thesis, but if you’re into that post-structuralist stuff and buy records accordingly, you should be warned that this is about as far from Mille Plateaux (the record label) as you can get. From the opening “Wolf In Center Page”, which disappears into silence without warning about halfway through only to return to bite your ears off, via the menacing thuds of “Ontology” and the low queasy growl of “Multiples” to the banshee shriek of “Ghosts”, it’s a rough ride, nasty but nice.
(Dan Warbuton, The Wire)
Duo work from Yukinori aka Dexter and leader of Japanese underground group Billy? and Mr. Tim Olive. High computer tones go up against doomy electro/drone stylings, paranoid late-night surveillance atmospheres, the sound of live electricity and tense drawn-out test tones. The closing “Ghosts” is one of the most beautifully hysterical shots of post-tongue electronics this side of Ryoji Ikeda or Borbetomagus. Wow.
(David Keenan, Volcanic Tongue)
An inscrutable record on which it’s not clear who is playing what across seven anonymous tracks with titles like ‘Small room’, ‘Shining’ and ‘Ontology’ which don’t give much away, but the music is fascinating and varied electronic emissions, full of invention and great deliberation – sometimes vaguely noisy, sometimes sternly implacable deep drones, their monotonal surfaces roughed up with skittery details. Olive’s distinctive playing is usually characterised by a very extreme form of disconnectedness, but many of these pieces exhibit a more continuous full-bodied roaring, the sort of activity you would expect from a team of gigantic beetles if they were ten times as large and refitted to produce electronic signals through their antennae. Natch, I gladly welcome such outsize coleoptera into my lair any day of the week.
(Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector)
Seven tracks of fairly harsh, knifing electronics that, at its best, provides some enjoyable lacerations. The brief opening track, for instance, ends with piercing keens, like metal scraped with metal, but very high, extremely sharp. The second offers respite, with (enticingly) awkward, low rumbles. Yukinori, who I don’t believe I’ve previously heard, and Olive work together seamlessly enough; no instrumentation is provided (I assume a combination of laptop and open electronics) but the music comes across as of a piece in any case. My preference is on those marginally quieter cuts, 2, 4 & 6 here, where the pair stretches things well, allows the crackles ‘n’ hums some space and gives more of an impression of letting things ambulate on their own rather than directly controlling them… All in all, a good tough recording, this one.
(Brian Olewnick, Just Outside)
Tim Olive 