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Submerged
Violence as First Nature

OHM Resistance

Posted: Monday, February 09, 2009
By: Matthew Johnson
Features Editor

Kurt Gluck is both the mastermind of Submerged and the owner of extreme drum & bass label Ohm Resistance, and his new album embraces both roles to the fullest, with both a CD of new and previously vinyl-only Submerged tracks paired with a mixed retrospective of Ohm Resistance. With well over two hours of music, it's enough to satisfy the most hardened drum & bass addicts; this is aggressive, brutal, uncompromising stuff. You won't find any mellow jazz or chill-out music here; it's all as violent and speedy as an AK-47 switched to full auto. While opening album track "Consciousness" starts things off with a deceptive loop of guitar strums, the track quickly morphs into something dark, tense, and evil, with guttural sampled loops of the song's title spinning in and out of soundtrack horns. "Bad Time for the Empire," despite a title that suggests political commentary on the state of the USA in the global arena, is actually ominous ninja jungle, the title borrowed from the child's narration from the classic Samurai film Shogun Assassin. "Homicide Bomber" is as brutal as it sounds with hard breaks, bangs, buzzes, and snares blasting with all the frantic velocity of an out-of-control big rig on a steep downward grade, and "Lady of Pain" uses just a hint of perky synth sequences to emphasize the overall grittiness of the rumbling rhythms. If Violence as First Nature never quite lets up, it does at the least slow down in one or two places. "Servant" is more creepy than blatantly aggressive, thanks to a wordless choir loop, and "Dirty Bomb" is understated, at least by the standards of the rest of the album, especially as remixed by Scorn's Mick Harris, who lowers the tempo of the clashing snares and drenches everything in a soft layer of distortion. Final track "I Love You but I Chose Darkness" seems to end things on a similarly quiet note with spaced out beeps and blips and a hint of strings, but that's just the calm before the storm. Once the album is finished, it's time to swap it out for the mix CD! Seamlessly blending an array of tracks from regular Ohm Resistance artists like Temulent, Silent Killer, and Gluck himself, it begins with a chaotic blast of noise aptly titled "Shitcollage" before shifting into high gear. While tracks range from gangster rap-inspired jungle offerings like Silent Killer's "Corpse" and "Endure" to more ominous compositions like the Submerged, Silent Killer, and End.user collaboration "No Real," the tracks all have one thing in common: they're all really mean. When they're not getting up in your face, they're creeping you out with soundtrack samples or bringing you down with references to suicide as on the Submerged and Temulent collaboration "Suicide Hotline," which is included here in both its original version and in remixes by both of the contributing artists. Of electronic music's various subgenres, drum & bass had, for a while at least, a sort of rarefied intellectual quality about it as embodied by the likes of LTJ Bukem and Photek. The Ohm Resistance crew, on the other hand, has more in common with industrial and breakcore artists like Hecate and Kid606. If you're looking for mellow coffee house beats, look elsewhere. Violence as First Nature is drum & bass for masochists only.