Biometry

Der Zyklus is Heinrich Mueller, who is actually electro producer Gerald Donald of Dopplereffekt and Japanese Telecom. Confused? Then welcome to the shadowy world of Detroit electro, where producers dodge Christian naming like secret agents' sworn allegiance to analog nations, where you'll never be certain what it says on the checks being paid out on the other end, as you lay your money down for a faceless barrage of machine music. Having recorded several 12"'s for Clone, Novamute and International Deejay Gigolo, where cabal members included Anthony "Shake" Shakir and Rudolf Klorzeiger, this first full-length produced by Donald alone is the most paranoid, claustrophobic and downright spooky of all his highly edgy robotic suites. The electro-pop of Dopplereffekt appears only occasionally, on tracks like "Eigenface (Facial Asymetry)" and "Biometric Systems," while a majority of the album merely creeps outward with cold and clinical waves of sine, no beat necessary. Like all great Detroit techno artifacts, Biometry has a loose theme. And while Japanese Telecom might have played with the electronic fusion of communication and pornography, this album takes a sterile look at biometric identification systems which rob us of our privacy and our personality, removing our souls and leaving nothing but DNA strands to be indexed by the powers that be. What's scary is how real all of this actually sounds in our post-9/11 information age. No wonder Donald sounds so neurotic. ~ Joshua Glazer|