VITAL WEEKLY No 1072

You may remember P.S. Stamps Back? The project of Iason working the electronics to create a more dance oriented beat, with ‘Half Life’ (reviewed in Vital Weekly 1028) being a highlight so far. Here he teams up with two bass players, Sotiris and Yiannis (all of them come from circles in which last names don’t matter; ‘copies have no rights’ it says on the cover as a tell-all), who are a member of hardcore/grind band Ksera. They formed an alliance under the guise of Millions Of Dead Tourists in April 2016 and apart from two bass guitars, the other equipment is played by Iason, and that includes ‘audiomulch, nanozwerg, erebus synths, pedal effects and sequencer’.
The five pieces on this self-titled CDR were recorded from May to September 2016. I had no idea what to expect really, and I was thinking something along the lines of Millions Of Dead Cops. That it is not. To me, but I’m sure this trio will see things entirely differently; Iason is the man who leads the troupe. There is quite a lot of sequencers and synthesizer sound to be noted in this music, and perhaps not a lot of bass guitar. It has not much to do with the world of hardcore or grindcore, and all with the alternative leanings of techno music. The bass guitar might very well be going through a bunch of sound effects, making it all light and thin, but it works well within the music. Should one not know this is a trio of musicians playing together, it could as easily pass as a one-man electronic army with a bunch of lo-fi apparatus, producing a wackier form of techno than one usually hears in a sweaty club. I very much enjoyed this crude take on techno, and towards the end, ‘The Day 1.71 Billion People Died And Went To Facebook” (which says probably they aren’t a laughing bunch) they go for some excellent minimalist guitar sound, acid synth, bass sequencer and a fine slow rhythm. I am not sure about the political side of all of this, but the music sounds quite all right. You should see me leaping up and down in the VW HQ.
(FdW)