Ever been and visited a Portuguese construction site? It might well sound a bit like Sektor 304. These noisy scrap metal merchants certainly know their stuff and sound like a collision of plenty of different industrial acts but still manage to crawl out from the wreckage of this hour long musical crash with a sound that is their own. On opener ‘Body Hammer’ drills whir and drums are hit in a rhythmical tribal roll. Vocals bristle as they are shouted out in an angry fashion and I am at first really reminded of UK and now unfortunately defunct act Leech Woman. Of course the roots of that band and this one go back a lot further and you will see their list of influences clearly listed on their home page, Einsturzende Neubauten, Test Department and SPK amongst them. The opening track is somewhat mesmerising with a bass chord repeating itself throughout and the soundscapes created here are all work in similar fusion at pulling you in. Gravity Factor is really caustic and the machines here have very much taken over and run amok, it’s kind of like being shoved in an air-lock and having the breath slowly sucked out of you and is a weighty vacuum that is disorientating and downright harsh and abrasive noise.
Other tracks are more subtle and the experimental flow is left to pulse and bristle away with a distempered but less in the face assault. ‘Voodoo Machine’ is one such example of this but that does not make it any less of an unnerving listen. ‘Pulse Generator’ does not defy trades descriptions, what it says is pretty much what you get in all its minimalist glory, this is the musical equivalent of plugging yourself in and although it might be a horrible idea to some it leaves me switched on. Quite often things are left to the instrumentation and vocals are either notable by their absence or simply whispered or eerily intoned in the background.
I think that ‘Blood Rush’ is particularly clever as the duo take the tribal idea to a real logical point and you are kind of dropped in the middle of the African veldt by the chanting and drumming. Perhaps this goes hand in hand with the discs packaging which is illustrated wit spears and masks. The alien sounding ‘Final Transmission’ concludes the album with a droning sort of static white noise that has both high end and down tuned parts working in co-ordination.
I have no idea where record label Malignant Records from the USA heard of us from but I am glad that they did as I really enjoyed Sektor 304. If you too go shopping at Tesco (not that one) and like your music to literally throw you onto a metallic scrap heap you should do too.
http://www.myspace.com/sektor304
http://www.myspace.com/malignantrecords
