Rabit & Chino Amobi The Great Game

Rabit & Chino Amobi’s game-resetting mixtape becomes plastic flesh on the former’s Halcyon Veil following 6 months spent infecting/inoculating the soundcloud water supply.

A masterpiece of modern industrial design, experimental grime, and hyper-violent collage, The Great Game: Freedom From Mental Poisoning (The Purification of the Furies) forms a shocking reportage from the frontline of sonic geopolitics and hyperreality: a strobing databurst of cinematic synth motifs and stoic, Anonymous-style text-to-speech delivery riddled with the shrapnel of smashed commercial idents and symbolism.

Using the exoskeletal structures and unrepentantly electronic, plastic tension of UK grime, twisted and kerned to provide a mutable, mesh-like grid, the mix breaks down to three movements; sweeping from the brooding intro and incubation of chaotic energies in Phalanx Formation, to the factual reel of Information Acts, and an urgent, panic-raising resolution in Decapitation of Critical Economic Nodes.
In a way, its ribboning flow could be considered a canny reflection of our daily scrolling habits, feeding a stream of hyperreality and illusive, fantastical graphics into vivid sound-images, whilst using the minimalist, instrumental syntax of UK grime - arguably the 21st century’s first, genuine forms of bottom-up “punk” music - as the most apt medium in which to convey their ideas and subvert their meaning.

Whatever way you view it, though, it’s a hugely compelling piece of work on so many levels, from the immediate and in-your-face, to the cerebral and intangible.