by Kingsley Marshall
Never has robot jazz been so applicable a pigeonhole than to this album for Rephlex, where Pierre Bastien echoes the actions of Blade Runner engineer J.F. Sebastian in his construction of mechanical curios to keep him company in an otherwise lonely studio. As the automatons strike, grind, and crunch an array of instrumentation drums so Bastien plays along with a variety of his own sonic weaponry -- the demented creator engaging with a metallic orchestra. Ironically, considering the nature of his Babbage-esque creations, the music has a sense of being somehow more honest than the sampled, filtered, and generally unnaturally messing which accompanies the use of more traditional LED-blinking counterparts -- the uncontrollable nature of these clockwork creations lending a sleepy jazz quality to the material, the palindromic titles a nod to the converging patterns created by the loops. "Revolt Lover" is the pinnacle of this, the machines gasping at the intensity of Bastien's horn line -- aching with a semblance of emotion that rivals many job-a-day sessioners.