croww: prosthetics

The result of a febrile fantasy cooked up after 2015's Moss Side Carnival, Prosthetics is the grim-as-fuck first release nested by Croww, a bold new outlier from the edgelands of south Manchester. Croww's debut for The Death Of Rave features a pack of obscure, pre-Roadrunner Slipknot samples which have been painstakingly gerned beyond recognition, concatenated, and u-chronically folded into a fucked-up session, owing heavily to grind core, '90s D&B, and flashcore as much as modern, vantablack stripes of club music or rap instrumentals. It sounds like nothing out there right now, and, 20 years since Slipknot's emergence, it can be heard as an unimaginably distant echo of what became a proper subcultural phenomena. Harnessing detailed, flash-it blast beats, psychoacoustic shockwaves punctuated by samples from Iowa public access TV, and visceral wretches nodding to Slipknot's dead crow-sniffing rituals, the uniquely brittle but mercurial "Prosthetics (MechaMix)" and its four constituent digital "Prosthetic" parts, form a sort of stubborn study on the stifling nature of nostalgia. Through a stoic process of parsing his sincere, formative obsession with Slipknot along with contemporaneous samples and other extreme forms of music which never entered the band's original equation, and then scrying the whole thing through a hypermodern, street or bedroom level prism, Croww soberly inverts their source codes to extract a mutable expression of individuality from collective delirium in an era saturated by mimetic, populist clones trapped in an ever decreasing feedback noose of influence and reference. It blurs distinctions between mixtape, imagined soundtrack, and demonstrative show-reel with an unflinching guile deliberately blinkered to melodic or percussive convention, owing as much to the weightless inference of Total Freedom as the disciplined, shattering rage of Black Mecha, or the devilish metrics of La Peste's flashcore hyper structures. It's club music if you want it to be, or a portal for total, detached immersion and transcendence, if that's your thing. Either way, it's a brutally uncompromising and compelling expression of cybernetic body horror and private ecstasy, nailing unique ground in the shifting sands of modern culture's temporal flux -- ultimately as a record which could only really emerge in 2017. Housed in silver-stenciled, Japanese-style anti-static sleeves. One-sided; Cut by Dubplates & Mastering. Edition of 300.