MODUL8 pushes sonic extremes with his debut album "Corpse Sonata Vol. l"

MODUL8 has been lurking in the aural depths for over twenty years, and “Corpse Sonata Vol. l” sounds like the ultimate location on that restless quest. This Dutch innovator unites two obsessions, of sonic extremity and lyrical exactitude, in a genre that is his alone: curbstep. It’s a combustible cocktail of phonk, dubstep, trap, glitch and boom-bap, with the edges sharpened by emotional grit and an experiment in AI. The result is an album that doesn’t so much defy boundaries as immolate them, creating something both half-mechanical and deeply human.

The journey begins with “Ghosts of the Beats,” an atonal dispatch from somewhere on the moon (or possibly a lush forest) beyond the walls of sound. The track whimpers along with phonk influences and broken dubstep mechanics, connecting patches of a haunted tension that is yet to come. MODUL8’s machine-gun momentum slices through the mayhem like a scalpel as lethal for its brutal precision as it is for its barely contained lunacy. It could hardly be a more apposite opening statement, no mere display of technical prowess but a statement of intent: the album isn’t music for solace; it’s music for confrontation.

The tension remains thick in “Leaving Corpses (Can’t Help It)” as the pace quickens, while the walls draw in tighter. The production lurches into a squall of bent basslines and percussion as shrapnel, much like the spectres from the lead track, has resuscitated and is thrashing its way through everything in its path. And here, MODUL8 succumbs to his morbid fixation on death and renewal, deconstructing the beat as though it were a living thing. The jump from the first of those songs to the second reads as eminently logical, baleful in its matter-of-factness, a downward spiral through an artist’s psyche in which control and chaos take turns with each beat.

From there “Twisted Beginnings” twists the architecture further still, as if the entire album were folding onto itself. The rhythm warps and bends, pulling the listener into a groove that feels as unpredictable as it does intoxicating. MODUL8 takes over for a measured serving on the glitch-fest of suffix-laden production; he lets his words freefall in blurring time with that stuttered beat and spasmatic rhythm. The shift from the previous track feels intentional, a madness-gives-way-to-method moment that makes an implicit argument for the odd layout of the album’s sonic architecture.

By the time we get to “Pulse Collapse,” it almost sounds as if the sound were collapsing in on itself. Bassline and percussion layers crash into one another, with MODUL8’s voice fighting through the mix. The song throbs with exhaustion and triumph, the instant when each mess of interference and collision of frequencies comes together into something that becomes ecstatic. It’s the tail end of a storm, sonic debris that somehow still draws breath and proof that even destruction can have rhythm, if you listen close enough.

As the record peters out, “Corpse Sonata Vol. l” feels like the experiment none of them had been able to do until now; not a machine in musicians’ clothing, but an artist deploying machines to blow himself up impossibly, unimaginably big. In 14 tracks, MODUL8 makes machinedom into texture and fetish into form; this is a body of work that’s alive, leaping free of formalism and thrillingly new. Every shift, every beat mutation, is the tale of an artist returning to what it means to construct sound from despair.

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