Bleep

“Is the limit of a body drawn at the skin, or does a body extend beyond its epidermis?” Tomas More AKA December asks on his two part Tresor debut. Initiating the December project in 2014 via labels like Blackest Ever Black, More operates in exhilarating dark soundworlds where days are short and nights are infinite. Following his second album The Outside World, focussed on toppling the systems that enable global paranoia, Transform explores the psychophysical politics of bodies living in such systems in a round of transhumanist EBM.

What Remains Of Us snakes patiently in with sifting noise, waiting with bated breath as a disembodied cyborgian voice gutturally stutters the operative word “transform”. That blurring between organic and technological, the disconnect between bodily boundaries, is often probed in cyberpunk cinema, and December pushes such themes and inspirations into roaring turbulence as imperative phrases echo into the night. Hairs bristle and blood pumps as we are thrust into heavy laser rains and infrasonic tremors in a highly vigorous, eerie liminal rave. Effects-drowned vocals exist on the fray of legibility in ‘The Limit Of Control’, brutal electrocuting stomps barging through, while silvery industrial clangs and techno drum machines sprint into a viscous vortex on ‘Syndrome Of The Century’, where gushing jets lift the tracks before slamming right back down.

An Accident In Favor Of Human Life heightens the intensity, as heavy beat artillery on the title track is met with serrated morse code buzzes and glaring synth flashes. Irradiated reverberations tail after electro microbeats on ‘No Photographs, Only Memories’, bridged by a momentary reprieve to twitchy, corrugated coldwave rhythms on ‘Modern Phobias’, sonifying pulsating data streams through hardcore beats. ‘Unspoken Worlds Of Hope’ ends on a particularly visceral note, drilling with alarm bells while sighing pads add emotionality to the heaving club chaos.

December makes a crushingly corporeal intro to Tresor with the complete suite of his Transform project.