Detraex Corp

*200 copies limited edition* “Detraex Corp arrives on Sagome to deliver a heady journey through experimental rhythm and dub-informed weight and release with their new album ‘Live at Pompeii’. The album, much like its Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli created artwork, represents a journey, a collection of sounds and emotions, sequenced to share with us, the listener, a variety of experience, and of memory, which are at once familiar and other.

‘Live at Pompeii’ sets things off with the tone-setting ‘Tykes of’, where frazzled, shuffling drums meet sub bass weight and ketamine oud, sounding something like Wordsound’s Scarab leaving the 90s and entering the future. ‘Tombaroli’ invites the head nods, clearly communicating the album’s intentions and inviting us to that party under that out-of-town bridge with its insistent percussion and pulsing weight. Other tracks, such as ‘Bullet Holes’, carry us further into a psychedelic alternative, with its lysergic fever-dream soundtrack to an unnamed mediterranean plaza, and ‘No Minus’s sounding like a nascent, primitive distant cousin to Jeru’s Premier-produced ‘Come Clean’. 

‘Channel 83’ firmly returns us to the club, weaving mystical soundsystem magic with its stunted horns and swirl of voice, driven forward with the most chest-rattling of stomps, before the album enters its finale, where the grimey judder of ‘Expect Excerpt’ slides to a bleary-eyed half-speed, evoking the club which won’t let you leave. ‘Mount Point’ eventually provides that release, an early morning sunrise of a track, with rich, slow trudge and post-club shimmer, before ‘Landings Dub’ signals the end of the journey, a metallic elegy to what has preceded, and a contemplation of your upcoming repeat listen, and re-entry, to the world of Detraex Corp.” - Daniel Magee