SUBMERGED

The album opens with the three new tracks: Consciousness, A Bad Time For Empire and Homicide Bomber. Consciousness mixes ambient passages with repressed Drum N Bass runs that end as precipitously as they started. A Bad Time For The Empire plays with tempo and rhythm variations in a constantly shifting yet stubbornly relentless barrage of beats and sounds. Homicide Bomber has a surreal feel to it, almost like trying to walk around under water. The frenetic pace and manic rhythms are almost too much to cope with. From the tracks previously released only on vinyl, I Love You But I Chose Darkness is a personal favorite. The fuzzy electronic effects interspersed among the rhythmic phrases offer a surreal funhouse feel. Let Your Body Take Control is absolute madness. Don't pass through without giving this track a listen. Just don't lose your mind. Other highlights include Project Two, Cop Killer and Human Camera.

The second disc is mixes released by Ohm Resistance featuring artists such as Impulse, Temulent, Lethal, Khanage, Imaginary Forces and Silent Killer. At 28 tracks its too much to go into here, but suffice it to say that if you liked disc one you'll love disc two.

Submerged hits us up with Violence As First Nature as a celebration of the continued success of the Ohm Resistance label. Featuring a number of tracks from Submerged as well as mixes done with or by some of the most impressive names in electronic music (Bill Laswell and Scorn, just to name two). If Drum N Bass is your thing, then you've come to the right place. Submerged keep their electronic creations vibrant by constantly mutating the beats, sounds and rhythms. Violence As First Nature is both an exciting look backward at material not previously available on CD, but also an open window on the future of electronic music.

Rating: 3.5 Stars (Out of 5)

Wildy (courtesy of the Wildy's World blog)

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.

3 1/2 out of 5 stars

Matthew Johnson (courtesy of the Re:.Gen Magazine website)

Since he first emerged back in 2001 with his debut ’110' 12”, Brooklyn, NYC-based DJ / producer Submerged (real name Kurt Gluck) has emerged as one of the more outspoken voices amongst the US drum and bass scene, with his own Ohm Resistance label earning a reputation for releasing some of the country’s most ferocious hardstep productions. This second album ‘Violence As First Nature’ follows two years on from his 2007 debut collection on Sublight ‘Stars Light The End’ and in many senses acts as retrospective overview of his work so far, collecting together pretty much all of his pivotal 12” moments alongside collaborations with Impulse, Technical Itch and Bill Laswell. As the title suggests, the 12 tracks gathered here are certainly not aimed at the faint of heart. Indeed, opener ‘Consciousness’ manages to set the prevailing mood for the rest of the album pretty well, with the eerie sweep of sampled horror movie orchestration giving way to nosebleed ‘Amen’ breaks, dark, vaguely electro-industrial bass synth programming and timestretched screams – the entire thing coming across as the sort of thing you’d expect to hear at some junglist party held in an abandoned abbatoir. For the most part, the extreme pace pretty much doesn’t let up for the rest of the album, though ‘Doctored Intelligence’, a collaboration with Bill Laswell sees some refreshing tabla elements making an appearance before Scorn’s reworking of ‘Dirty Bomb’ offers a sidestep into shearing, breakstep-laden industrial textures that ventures a little closer to Techno Animal territory. ‘Violence As First Nature’ offers up an excellent overview of Gluck’s work as Submerged to date that’s made even better with the addition of the second mixed disc – but the less hardcore might want to wear a safety helmet before sticking this on.

Chris Downton (courtesy of the Cyclic Defrost website)