Part of the second limited batch of Summer Headrush 2009 releases from James Ferraro of The Skaters with full-colour pro-printed sleeves. Wild World is Edward Flex visits Multitopia, one of the bleakest and darkest of Ferraro’s recordings thus far, as he ties up fantasies of body modification and Hollywood stardom with terrible eschatological visions and cut-ups of recorded testimonies of members of the Heaven’s Gate mass-suicide cult on their hopes for a transport to heaven. His use of minimal musical fragments looped to infinity is at its most twisted and wrong, with obsessive vocal figures played out over leery keyboard parts and snippets of vocal that conflate plastic surgery with pre-lapsarian and post-UFO powers of transformation. There’s often a lurid, cartoon aspect to Ferraro’s amplification of the various desires that contemporary popular culture works as a cipher for but this one feels less technicolour and more desperate, charting the apocalyptic fantasies (via Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson) that find their apotheosis in California’s end-of-land culture through a series of black magical workings. Also features some of Ferraro’s most shredding 80s/90s metal guitar. An extremely heavy installment.

Part of the second limited batch of Summer Headrush 2009 releases from James Ferraro of The Skaters with full-colour pro-printed sleeves. Warning: Hacker Track™ is an eXtremely addictive cyber drug downloadable online into your brain. Hacker Track is a deprogramming/reprogramming tool created by Ferraro that uses auto-suggestion, hypnotism and sonic download technology in order to re-boot your mind. Hacker Track features some of Ferraro’s most obsessive loop constructs set within haunted laminal structures. The first piece is a murky fog of wave tones and modulated barbarous vocals that aims to by-pass the brain’s rational/language centers and effect complete organic/cyber communion. As the repeat-phrases become more alien and insistent the piece moves into a zone of ‘meaningless’ sound that works as an unsettling transport. The second piece deals in euphoric sonic boom stylings that somehow combine the wartime machinery of the David Jackman field recordings with triumphal organ tones and the expressway sounds of kundalini take-off.  A beautiful brain eraser.