Review: Big Brother On Acid - S/T

Big Brother On Acid“GO!” It’s a dubstep rave in a skydive simulator. I’ve only just registered the bass throb tugging at my shoes and now I’m wearing it as a bandana: low frequencies turn to high, storms rip dancefloors in half, Amazonian fauna and flora sprout up where a neon purple metropolis once was. I am the perfect prey for Big Brother On Acid – a safety-netted, fully acclimatised dance club drone, whose world falls under threat if the bass and rhythm slip away from the nether-Hz. I feel dumb; drunk, even. Saxophones and R&B voices ambush me when my guard droops down. “No one had a bad trip – it was all very good,” a voice tells me, and I’m too queasy to dispute.

Each track is an electronic clog; bits of cyber flannel and melodic foam crammed ruthlessly into the stereo bucket. There’s barely room for my to wave my arms and legs as I so wish, and thus I wedge myself timidly in a corner and try not to breathe out. Slap bass and funk guitar gnash their teeth in my face, and during “John Warren” I feel like I’ve been violently mobbed by various clans in turn: a horde of disco kings, a line of robots, a bunch of wah-pedal stoner hippies. The beat is constant and yet always changing, pummelling each frequency receptor in turn as the equalisation is winched up and down; denting my cognitive capacity until my thoughts take place in a binary slither between the hallucinatory flashbacks and circuit boards. ON: I embody the noise. OFF: I black out.