** 300 copies only, no repress ** DIY cassette culture - flowering across the globe during the late 1970s and 1980s - has proven, from a distance, to be among the most fascinating contexts of music to emerge during the last half century. Taking the form of reissues and archival releases - taping this astoundingly rich vein of exploration and covering a vast field of distinct creative territories - incredible artefacts have fallen, one after another, into our hands. Among the most striking of these have been a widely celebrated series of LPs - issued by the Dutch imprint, Ongehoord - surveying the Amsterdam based project Deadline Paranoia’s output during a brief but prolific run that began in 1986. Now this incredible, revelatory journey culminates with 3 / 3, the series’ stunning conclusion. A mind-bending, free-standing sonic world from a band with no equivalent, like its predecessors, 3 / 3 has to be heard to be believed.
Almost entirely unknown prior to Ongehoord’s exploratory deep dive, Deadline Paranoia was a quintessential gesture of the 1980s musical underground. Based in Amsterdam and led by Hugo Vlugt, Marcel Witte, Paul Hettema and Paul Soto, between 1986 and 1988 - fueled by a steady diet of drugs - the group self-released four strikingly singular cassettes, deploying the DIY ethos as a means toward personal and creative freedom, before disappearing from view.
A crystalline distillation of the band’s singular sound - hybridizing punk, dub, industrial, experimental, and ambient music - 3 / 3 is arguably the most introspective and emotive of the material brought to light by Ongehoord to date. From its first guttural exhalations - flirting at the border of primal minimalism - tribal percussiveness, woozy dubs, rolling riffs, druggy jams, and meditative rhythms, form as a deeply personal and phycological music that stands as as pitch-perfect rebuttal to the oppressive, conformist temperaments of the era, presenting an inward journey into the minds of a remarkable group of musicians who payed loyalty to none.
A moody, surreal trip - balanced at the razor's edge between the meditative and anarchic - blending hypnotic, off kilter beats into a thick atmosphere of instrumentation, Deadline Paranoia’s 3 / 3 is an inspiring revelation that sets history on its head. Truly incredible from start to finish, immerse yourself in this final exploration of one of the most fascinating unknown bands that ever was. Pressed on black vinyl, and including a graphic essay of the original artwork that graced Deadline Paranoia’s cassettes, this one isn’t going to sit around for long.
