Sprawl, The (Logos, Mumdance & Shapednoise) EP 1

THE SPRAWL is a scindicate of mutant soundcarriers individually known as Logos, Mumdance and Shapednoise. Following their improvised live conception at Berlin’s CTM15 festival, EP1 documents THE SPRAWL’s debut studio transmissions in the first of a series to be archived by The Death of Rave.

As their moniker suggests, The Sprawl is heavily influenced by William Gibson’s eponymous and prescient trilogy of sci-fi novels; most crucially the cybernetic predictions of Neuromancer and the ways in which its notions of uploaded consciousness and the effects of technology have played out in our collective reverie.Hacking up memories of late ‘90s tech-step and the millenial dread of early grime thru a matrix of modular synths, haptic constructs and computer software, the trio))) jack-in a quartet of corrupted memory updates emulating the physical and mental impact of SimStim overload and fractious hyperreality.

Head first, ‘Drowning in Binary’ plunges into a maze of recursive techno-chambers vacillating white hot dis-torsion with arcing, weightless pads, before glyding across a tumultuous topography of chrome burning flares and violent, body-quaking detonations in the morphing scape of ‘From Wetware To Software’.With ‘Haptic Feedback’ they grasp the quicksilver rush of classic Prototype and Reinforced Records in a strobing sequence of picnoleptic, kinaesthetic flashbacks and transitory segues smeared with vision-blurring noise, stranding us in the below-kelvin, post-human headspace of ‘Personality Upload’ unaware of up from down.

By design or chance, the results distill a scrambled uchronia of references, incomparably conflating the obscure French speedcore subgenus of La Peste with a ruffneck take on cinematic sound design whilst also skewering the UK’s ‘ardcore continuum by way of new wave Italian noise physix. Like Gibson’s original series, The Sprawl will reveal its dimensions in due course for the DJ conspiracists, bunker dwellers and tech-noise terrorists.

Mumdance also releases solo on XL, most notably with grime prodigy Novelist, and also runs the Different Circles club-night and label in London with production partner Logos, who released the ‘Cold Mission’ LP to widespread acclaim in 2013. Shapednoise is a Berlin-based native of Naples, Italy, and co-founder of Cosmo Rhythmatic and Repitch Recordings.