The Andronechron Incident (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

The liner notes describe this collaborative effort as being the soundtrack to a mysterious European science fiction film, presumably from sometime in the '60s à la Alphaville and Barbarella, about strange egg-like structures that invade the earth. It's an elaborate hoax (with appropriately curious cover art) that helps present this duly trippy and spooked-out exploration in rough dance sonics and cinematic orchestration from the year 3000. If it's not quite the point where IDM makes a stab at Ennio Morricone and Wendy Carlos territory, it's closer than might be thought, as the stabbing alien-signal synth tones and weird drones of "Crimson Skies and Vapour Trails" and the slinky strings and cool jazz drums on "The People of the Monolith" readily show. Everything is underpinned with rather more modern beats and glitches, positing what might have happened if Austin Powers really did travel through time and ended up in a laptop. The combination draws on everything from hip-hop's exquisite sense of sampling use and the big beat (check out "The Garbled Weaver" for some pretty frenetic loops) to the straight-up atmospherics of dark ambient compositions, and as such isn't a remarkable innovation but a sharp consolidation of styles by the two musicians. The continuing influence of the Aphex Twin and his many followers in the art of clipped electronic percussion can easily be heard in songs like "Breakfast in Malneant." Meanwhile, the sheer noisefest unleashed at points in collages of distortion and beats makes sudden contrasts down to low bass drones or gentle late-night piano seduction music all the more fun and enjoyable. Great interlude — the German-accented scientist who expounds his plans to "free" all the entrapped minds from the "premeditated idiocy" of medical science over the dark, looped drone on "With a Tongue of Madness."