Dread cities
Kevin Martin and Dylan Carlson soundtrack the megalopolis. By Ian Harrison.
The Bug Vs Earth Concrete Desert NINJA TUNE. CD/DL/LP
AS CELEBRATED tributes by the likes of Joy Division, Hawkwind, Gary Numan and loads more have repeatedly proven, groups love JG Ballard, the visionary novelist who found revelatory, psychological charge in the insanity and perversions of modern existence. The Bug, AKA Kevin Martin, is no exception, having said that the author’s mid-’70s triple-punch of Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise “scarred me for life”. Recorded with Earth’s drone-metal pioneer guitarist Dylan Carlson, the 10 out-of-body experiences of Concrete Desert remember, retrace and reopen similar psychic scars, reframing them in a sonic meditation on the mega-city of Los Angeles. It’s true that the two may not be the most immediately compatible collaborators – on the face of it, Martin’s industrial-strength experiments in dub, grime and dancehall sit peculiarly with
Carlson’s slow-riff rock and Ennio Morriconeinfluenced evocations of the American frontier. Yet, as well as having shared roots in the underground noise catacombs, here they find common ground in a vision of Los Angeles as a merciless, fragmented cipher for western society’s delusional dreams of fantasy glamour and wealth without consequence. The picture’s hellish. Recorded on location in two days, the album builds on the sonic territory marked out by 2014’s ghostly, claustrophobic 12-inch team-up Boa/Cold, with Carlson’s guitars variously pealing forth molten distortion, rustbelt grind and, on occasion, the kind of clipped figures that feature on Sergio Leone westerns after someone’s been shot, while Martin answers with predatory beats, monster bass tones and sinister metalloid textures. These are debris
strewn, tactile, slow-motion visions, thick with heat haze, fumes and chemical drizzle. Throughout, familiar forms are submerged and transformed: Don’t Walk These Streets – which refers to the non-status of the pedestrian in that most automotive of cities – is a broiling clash of dub and hip-hop, while insectoid fear theme Agoraphobia suggests
a gnarly, desert outlaw jam: the cold, blunted blues of Hell A, meanwhile, brings prelapsarian memories of electro and R&B. But as with the nightmare traffic interchange depicted on the cover, there’s no-one around to hear it. Martin’s described it as a corollary to 2008’s London Zoo, but a more apt comparison might be an instrumental, West Coast answer to his spectral work with King Midas Sound. During his career, Ballard said he considered his role one of cautioning his readers of horrors yet to come – like holding a sign at the side of the road warning of a car crash up ahead, or making long range weather forecasts. In this endeavour, Carlson and Martin have joined him: evilly powerful, filmic and flowing, Concrete Desert is as immersive a worst-case-scenario and trip into the dark as you could hope for.