Beautyon - Your Ignorance Makes Me Ill, And Angry

Irdial Discs - LP

UK, 1993

Techno / Experimental

A mesmerizing LP, showcasing a genuinely odd take on techno minimalism by Irdial Discs's mastermind (Akin Fernandez). Like everything released by arguably one of the most cutting-edge label of its time, Your Ignorance Makes Me Ill, And Angry holds a special place in the pantheon of British electronic music, in a singular spot somewhere in-between the kind of IDM heralded by Warp's champions and a dense history of UK techno. Some of the most innovative and off-the-beaten-track techno-ish music I've heard. Highest recommendation!

A dry and straightforward motorik kick bluntly welcomes the listener, promptly followed by confusing chords of ominous pads. By the second track, the esoterically titled "Crystal Corners", Beautyon makes his idiosyncratic formula even more complex: menacing and eerie, the song follows a path hard to apprehend, convoking familiar elements (chimes) and unidentified ones, and that, for once, can easily stand the comparison with the effects of ketamine on one's perception of their environment (unlike so many trance / progressive house tunes, with their predictable build-ups, that have be so often, and very wrongly compared to acid trips).

Akin Fernandez already offered the proof, several times (notably under his Aqua Regina moniker), that no matter how weird and twisted his music might be, it still belongs to the (deep) house corpus. He demonstrates it once again with the poisonous, dissonant but nonetheless weirdly soulful house stomper "Don Pilone 2". The rest of the album is, to put it simply, some of the best British 1990's electronic music I've ever heard: the mind-stopping ambient stasis of "To Swill Ping", entirely based on one sample from the intro of SNES classic game Pilotwings ; the blissful minimalism of "Mode" ; and the completely unexpected soulful Rhodes ballad "Plammo"... A weird, eerie and unique masterpiece. (VG+/VG+)