flu.ID make scary asylum music. iots is a collection of their previously released ten-inch EPs, remastered and rereleased in one convenient package. Convenient for scaring the living crap out of your neighbours and yourself, that is.
There are plenty of musical sub-genres that specialise in intensity, but flu.ID seem to have decided to carve their own one-band niche. Nestled somewhere between the high-octane mathcore of The Dillinger Escape Plan and the angular brutality of grind, nurtured on the raw aggression of noise and dosed up with a spoonful of digital hardcore, the songs collected on iots (if “songs” is the right term) are calculated assaults on the senses.
No, scratch that, these aren’t assaults – they’re full-on muggings of your consciousness, the sonic equivalent of being knocked down by a gang of escaped psychopaths in a stolen car, then bludgeoned into the gutter with the spoils of a music shop ram-raid while they howl their paranoid imaginings at you through a mental blur of societal confusion and bad amphetamines.
flu.ID are not aiming for easy listening here, or even for the conventional and pedestrian aggressions of heavy music. iots documents the envelope being pushed so hard that it ruptures; flu.ID are explorers, experimental scientists in the Doctor Frankenstein mould.
As such, iots is the sort of thing that is going to leave plenty of people cold. Brutalist bludgeon interspersed with nosebleed electronica is not high on the list of descriptions of a good time, and to be quite honest I’m not sure I’d describe listening to flu.ID as a pleasurable experience.
But it’s fascinating nonetheless, like stumbling across autopsy stills on some obscure website or passing the maggot-ridden corpse of a dead cat on your way to the off-licence; it’s so unpleasant that its sheer out-of-the-ordinariness has a compulsive power all its own. You can’t not pay attention.
So listen in nauseous fascination as flu.ID compile a catalogue of musical nastiness. “Necromancer” features freaky pitch-shifted vocals that sound like a playground full of children being hosed down with LSD-laced napalm, for example, while “New Imperial Sadism” sounds like the results of leaving a vomit-prone lead-poisoned bipolar child in the same room as an old Moog set to a techno bass patch; burbling cries and screeches are interspersed between echoing plinks and bloops of sound with seemingly no rhythm or purpose whatsoever.
The weirdest parts of iots are balanced out by the comparative normalcy of flu.ID’s howling noisecore attacks. “Estonia Flutet Die Titanic” is a savage slice of punk noise by regular standards, but here sounds almost pedestrian, and “Strategy First” would be a vanilla chunky grind-metal number were it not for the rambling Melvins-esque midsection.
But both are thrown into stark contrast by the interlude of “Zeugli”, which is the sort of thing Richard D. “Aphex Twin” James hears in his nightmares - a bizarrely melodic take on gabba techno being remixed by Alec Empire on the worst comedown of his life.
iots is not for the fainthearted, but the more strong-stomached musical adventurer will find the journey rewarding in ways that I don’t really have words for. It’s not pleasure, and it’s not precisely pain either, but it’s something visceral that demands to be taken seriously. flu.ID are a force; allow it to act on you.
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