[Long Island Electrical Systems]
Decidedly unburdened by structural limitations of genres, the Long Island Electrical Systems (L.I.E.S.) label from NYC steadily continues its meteoric rise in the field of sonic experimentation. Ron Morelli’s entropic vision, his thinking outside the box — or better yet outside all boxes — brought us a heavy slew of strangely beautiful, barely definable set of records this year, which garnered undisputed praise from across the electronic music spectrum. After unraveling a massive aggregate of promising new artists through the label’s roster, he now returns to his own dormant collaborative project with Jason Letkiewicz as Two Dogs In A House. While earlier incarnations of the alias mostly tested the freaky elasticity of house music, Eliminator presents a monstrous odyssey of house/noise cross-pollination, raw machine funk and ominous soundscapes.
The “Eliminator” twins are basically two different approaches to the same exploration of pulsations and pulses, successfully probing into spatial qualities of sound. The first begins with corrosive gurgling and vibrantly clusters around a complex but a propulsive beat sequence. Encrusted in serrated echoes, snares, hi-hats, and claps grind up against each other, creating a perfect basis for the dreading headhunter theme. In the middle of the composition (some seven minutes or so in), Morelli and Letkiewicz pepper-spray the existing Chicago framework with laser-guided assaults of noise and otherworldly textures; during this breakdown, they reveal a cinematic dimension of the Eliminator — a cyberpunk transfiguration — conjuring visions of destroyed assembly-line robots and military automatons in a macabre dance routine. The pounding rhythm then overcomes the textural friction and increases its relentless physical presence, docking the track to a silent end.
“Eliminator II,” on the other hand, focuses on a much more austere dub aesthetic, invoking a persistent sense of not only unfolding, but also violently capturing the sound in time. Although similarly beat-driven as its predecessor, it is engulfed by a slow-burning churn of endlessly spiraling acid projectiles and sinister modulations, ricocheting off each other in eccentric motion. The abrasive cyborg reverberations and thumping bass get so completely under your skin, that at points it feels as if the sound is coming from somewhere inside you. There’s definitely an apocalyptic feeling that we are nowhere, rather than somewhere, pervading throughout both tracks. Two Dogs In A House envisioned a stunningly dangerous world on this piece of wax, and whatever Eliminators are eliminating, I’m most certain nobody got through it alive.
