It is fair to say that Swan Grinder, Schkeuditzer Kreuz’s third and most recent album was an intense and challenging piece, an album that hopped, stormed, warped, and even melted genres as it passed through them on its way to the future, or at least one vicious and visceral take on one possible version of it. And I mean that in the most positive of ways, after all, nothing exciting was ever made in comfort zones, and there is nothing new to be found in nostalgia.
This blend of the avant-garde and the pioneering, of noise-rock and industrial sonic art, punk ethics and genre-destroying attitudes was already a revolutionary collection of music. But pushing the boundaries of music is relative to where an artist thinks those boundaries lie, and the great thing about handing your work over to another artist to play with is that the remixer might have completely different ideas about where to head for and where the song/noise boundary lays. (And even if going beyond it is even an issue.)
And so, here we have seven of the eight extreme art attacks that made up Swan Grinder taken to even more extremes.
The title track and opener’s seering sound remains in place, but it is pushed through a further industrial-metal-dance filter, adding a claustrophobic intensity and bruising beats to the already striking sound. Robert Inhuman’s reworking of “Sirens of Death” feels like it is trying to make sense of a broken, white noise-distorted incoming signal, turning mayhem into melody, chaos into groove, and “Keep Dancing” has added layers of angularity and terror.
“Systemic Death” is interesting not least because it is now a remix of a cover; it is interesting to see how far it has come in just three steps from the Crass original, as such it is both familiar and fresh, the original alt-punk delivery system now clothed in even sharper edges and scathing shards.
This is music of extremes, music that takes the original, as extraordinary as that was, into even more sonic outer limits, music made on the edge, and as they say, if you are not living on the edge, you are taking up too much room.
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