3 out of 5

Label: Digital Hardcore

Producer: Alec Empire

…And as I started exploring Atari Teenage Riot, it only seemed fair to check out Empire’s solo stuff.

Now I’m starting at a random point, so I don’t know nothin’ from nothin’ – if the tracks on this vinyl single appear elsewhere as they’re mixed here, if this single was released for any particular purpose – but maybe that’s best, ’cause then I can just rate the songs for what they’s is.

If the name of the game for Empire when he’s making beats and not ambient noodlings is aural assault, this brief splash of songs shows a few different shades of that method – one excellent track that throttles you with beats and samples (“Pleasure is Our Business”), one equally great track that peels back the aggression to deliver a pretty good rave-up that builds in enough interesting elements over it’s 7-minute runtime of loosely ragga-inspired beat to keep it fresh and challenging (“Hardcore Gal”), and one boring track that does what the boring ATR tracks would do and just repeats a beat and a sample to no great effect other than to loop it for a few minutes (“Destroyer (Pt.2)”).  The production qualities are nice in that they have a sort of “live-committed-to-tape” sound, but along with not knowin’ nothin’ about Empire’s catalogue, I equally know nothin’ about synthesizers, so maybe it’s actually a shitty recording.  But I like the roughness to it.

So for 2 out of 3, Alec’s solo work does what I’d hoped – dropping the ATR shtick of preach preach preach to just get angry with the beats.  A whole album of this is probably going to be prone to the same unevenness, but the dude’s put out like 9,000 releases, so maybe that’s inevitable.