Paranoia Inducta - Blood Electric
written by Ralle Ravn
As Anthony Armageddon Destroyer describes it himself on the album’s Bandcamp page, Blood Electric is “a bit unusual and different from the Paranoia Inducta style” which is not a wrong statement. Where Paranoia Inducta usually uses noise and industrial sounds, this album makes use of East Asian instrumentation layered on top of dark ambient drones to create eerie atmospheres with industrial sounds occasionally stepping in and out of these atmospheres.
Multiple tracks contain flutes, bell-like sounds, throat singing, and voices reminiscent of chanting. The fourth and sixth tracks, Jaguar and VTR respectively, feature spoken word in Japanese by musician, graphical artist, and cyberpunk writer Kenji Siratori whose voice is run through effects adding to the album's atmosphere. While Mr. Destroyer is trying to experiment with genres on this album, the album is not a lot more than what I described earlier: East Asian musical tropes layered on top of dark ambient drones.
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The organic-sounding East Asian parts and the mechanical and lifeless-sounding industrial and dark ambient don’t completely mix and the attempt at experimentation feels very clear. There is a lot of messing around with different instruments and vocals and the dark ambient and industrial parts simply feel like backdrops. The dark ambient parts, by the way, outweigh the industrial parts by a lot.
That being said the album is not without coherence because where the two genres actually mix they mix very well. The fifth track Embryo Commands has a very cool shamanistic vibe to it, and the opening track Mirror of Chaos, and the closing track Cosmic Cannibalism both have a nice dark mystical feel to it like standing on a foggy mountain. There is also a nice melancholic feel on the track VTR.
Anthony Armageddon Destroyer was trying to create an East Asian-inspired mystical atmosphere on this album. It’s a shame that the mystery is solved very quickly and you simply get two different genres layered on top of each other that simply don’t have the same coherence as on the more cinematic album Demon’s Factory from the same year. But if you’re into East Asian shamanistic music enshrouded in dark ambiance by all means check the album out. If you’re looking for dark/death industrial like you could expect from Paranoia Inducta you might want to take your precautions listening to this one.
