population one: theater of a confused mind

Deadly Population One album from Terrence Dixon on Rush Hour. Under the Population One codename, Detroit citizen Terrence Dixon has realized some of his most vivid, esoteric portals to the Motor City mindset. Theater of a Confused Mind is Dixon's second album in this mode and marks a timely return to Rush Hour 20 years after his debut album, Unknown Black Shapes, and the Hippnotic Culture 2LP, whose "Rush Hour" track inspired the label's name. In both the literal and figurative sense of the album's title -- theater as a space for performance or an operating table, and equally in terms of psychogeography -- Theater of a Confused Mind plays out an affected Afro-futurist narrative over eight tracks of haunting and furtive sci-fi techno. It's riddled with cryptic connotation, systemic from the track titles to its deft, subtle mix-down, all drawing upon the city's emotions, industrial architextures and post-industrial panoramas to better express its sense of soul. Between opener "Out of Control," where Dixon is the voice-in-Detroit's-head, a dark interpreter whispering to himself "Detroit, Out of Control/As I Walk Through The Mists Of Detroit/And You Don't Know What We Be," and through to the mind-blowing sci-fi projections of closer "All of a Sudden," it renders a unique perception of Detroit's enduring export. Tracing circuitry like grid-iron avenues, Dixon deviates down back alleys, through warehouses and across mental space, divining the ghosts of jazz in the coiled double bass of "For Only You," or long-lost S.O.S. transmissions in the tribal patterns of "Code Urgent," while the prickling electro of "Battle for Space" condenses that fractured flux at the album's core, and the chaotic harmonies of "My Own Shadow" encapsulate a Kafkaesque sense of raving paranoia.