Da GobliNN - God Reactor (2020)

Here's another you've never heard of, although to be fair, me neither, so we're both in more or less the same boat even if I'm sat slightly nearer to where the sandwiches are stowed away by virtue of my having been spinning this banger for a good couple of weeks now; or specifically I've been spinning a CDR burned from the download. I would have had it pressed onto a series of wax cylinders, obviously, but I ran out of the blanks.

As a rule I tend to steer clear of arbitrary typographic eccentricity, but God Reactor caught me on a good day and it was on the New York Haunted label, so that seemed like a recommendation. It's your basic dirty old school acid, but as with a lot of stuff on this label, it never quite does what you might expect it to do and ends up going all sorts of unfamiliar places, sonically speaking, nevertheless riding on the familiar squelch and crunch-clap of the form, and with the music swelling in waves, coming and going, up, down, back up again, then right up - both mesmerising and euphoric without looking like a wanker.

In theory we have four tracks, then six remixes of God Reactor, but so remixed as to be entirely different tracks. At least I've been listening to this for a couple of weeks and I still haven't spotted the connection; so ten tracks, for the sake of argument: some familiar acid without, as I say, quite doing anything you might expect, plenty of harmonics and loops and snippets of filtered noise, although not quite anything the milkman could ever whistle; and then the L/F/D/M remix which makes me think of bass music, as in the Miami thing; the May McLaren remix which - for fuck's sake - is the most eighties thing you've ever heard and could almost be Trevor Horn's version of Front 242, yet somehow very much belongs to the God Reactor whole despite itself; and I'm not going to describe every last track, but there's a lot of stuff going on here, and for something to which repetition is so obviously fundamental, no-one seems to be reheating any existing recipes.

God Reactor is why you really, really need to open yourself up to new shit every once in a while. I know that now.