| Although Octavius is a producer with roots in hip-hop, his music touches down on a more ambient terrain, where the beats often play second fiddle to dark, sci-fi cinema wrought of stray samples, vocals, and live instrumentation. At first, Audio Noir strikes you as heavily experimental and bleak, but remarkably, the album's play goes down the gullet without much effort at all. Credit Octavius for delivering such delicious left-field despondency. A track like "Monochrome" kicks things off with its apocalyptic score, flavored by thick, echo chambered lyrics growling over morbid settings of strings and backward guitar loops. The track, a tense, spine-tingling trek for the psyche, climaxes into a swirling cacophony full of rock dynamics, guitar chords, and drums crashing tsunami-like against their placid cliffs. "Momentum/Parisian War Song" and the rhythmic "Speed Limit" exploit spoken-words, throwing them into an unforgiving cloud of stomach churning beatscapes. "Sudden and Increasingly Strange Behavior" continues with rays of hope struggling to find their way out of a suffocating fog, invoking bittersweet desperation. By the album's end, you feel strangely sad and exhausted, but also satisfied at finding such entertainment value within its tortured constructs. - Outburn |
2XLP/Out Of Print