Opsy - A New Kind of Radiation

[Bill]

 

Artist: Opsy

Album: New Kind Of Radiation

Label: Soundmute Recordings

Released: June 2013

 

For the last year-and-a-half I was convinced that "New Kind Of Radiation" was a great psychedelic techno album. When it came time a couple days ago to put some positive things together to say about it... I came up blank. The words should come easy, phrasing the different pieces of the album should not be difficult, everything should flow well if I'm expressing things honestly.

 

And that's where the snag happened.

 

I gave the album a few more listens over the past few days and, yes, it is a good album, sometimes a very good album, but it is not the great album I kept thinking it was.

 

Unfortunately for psychedelic techno artists, the style is not highly respected within the psytrance community (unless you are Perfect Stranger and place heaps of progressive in with your techno or unless you are A. Balter or Boris Brejcha who do straight techno but curiously get lumped in with the psychedelic crowd) and the style is even less respected, much less known, by the pure techno crowd. One who dabbles in this style cannot be blamed for trying to draw in a larger audience which is what I believe Opsy is doing here and where my misgivings lie with the album.

 

Starting with the album cover that graffiti scarred alleyway feels more like a spot for thugs and bad vibes than for anything mind-expanding or psychedelic. It feels like the sort of alleyway one might venture down to get to an underground locale with a big sound system, where the electronic music is more a scene than a culture, which is exactly what the first two tracks of this album seem to be made for.

 

The sample-heavy "Growing Iceberg" is big-room psychedelic techno made for mass appeal while "Death At The Discotheque" sounds primed-and-ready for the Beatport crowd. Neither are horrible tracks, by any means, but in a psychedelic techno scene where the sounds are often raw and heavy these two feel annoyingly polished.

 

Three of the ten tracks here are remixes and those included here draw from some interesting source material. While the remix of Alic's addictive "Proper Language" fits in perfectly with what one expects from psychedelic techno, the remixes of progressive acts Man Machine and Ectima again feel like an appeal to a broader fan base. Again, neither of these are horrible, and while I am of the opinion that Ectima has as much in common with tech-trance as they do with dark progressive, it cannot be denied that the Ectima duo have a healthy following to their name. The Man Machine remix definitely feels like progressive meets psychedelic techno and the results are passable, it would probably have worked better by remixing the Man Machine side project Excizen instead as it lies directly in line with this style.

 

However, understood, an artist who does not take chances is an artist that will not grow. Perhaps, also, this is the Opsy that has been around long before "New Kind Of Radiation" was released but this much material in one place only shed light on his true nature. I can't help but feel that an album full of work similar to the later tracks and the sheer dark, thumping creativity contained in "Dig A Hole," "Dungeon," "Control Tower" and the ridiculously well-executed "Rubber Duck" would have made this album undeniably great.

 

The rest, though, well, it is a lot of colorful graffiti on dingy walls and in psychedelic techno, dingy walls, so to speak, are a badge of honor.